Israel trying to pass the hospital bombing off as Palestine doing it is utterly disgusting and guarantees Netanyahu a spot in the deepest pit of Hell for all eternity, obviously, but do not forget that
a) the only reason why Westerners will believe it is because they want to believe it - they are not being brainwashed and this is not some masterful propaganda being weaved around us to turn kind-hearted people into monsters,
b) no Westerner opinions matter at all. In most Western countries there is no real anti-Israel option to vote for even if they did realize that Israel was a giant factory for crimes against humanity, and Westerners protesting against things in general almost never achieves anything (tens of millions protested for BLM in 2020 and not only did the situation not change, it got worse), and
c) the people whose opinions do matter (both the people in the region, and the leaders who aren't already Zionist compradors) already know that Israel is full of shit and that they just murdered nearly a thousand civilians in a single bomb attack.
It is despair-inducing to think that the genocidal Zionist entity is so brazenly, so smugly getting away with bullshitting this away into a cloud of confusion, as they release their metaphorical squid ink just like they did with the stupid babies story, but the propaganda and the media narrative that they are creating isn't what matters. It cannot address the fundamental contradictions ripping the country, the region, and the world apart any more than masterfully-applied makeup can fix a stab wound. It can merely obfuscate.
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against Israel. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA daily-ish reports on Israel's destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news (and has automated posting when the person running it goes to sleep).
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis.
English-language PalestineResist telegram channel.
Various sources that are covering the Ukraine conflict are also covering the one in Palestine, like Rybar.
The Country of the Week is still Palestine! Feel free to chime in with books, essays, longform articles, even stories and anecdotes or rants.
Here is the map of the Ukraine conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The weekly update isn't coming because I'm sick and too focussed on the collapse of the Zionist entity.
Links and Stuff
The bulletins site is down.
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Add to the above list if you can.
Resources For Understanding The War
Defense Politics Asia's youtube channel and their map. Their youtube channel has substantially diminished in quality but the map is still useful.
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Telegram Channels
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
Pro-Russian
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
Last week's discussion post.
I wonder when the first major
state will jump ship. The unwavering Israel support is a PR disaster.
My local newspaper has been completely uncritical of Israel so far, but even they can't bring themselves to say that it was Hamas who bombed the hospital, they just say "both sides are blaming each other". They're trying to pull some kind of "Islamic terrorism is back" narrative to fuel the anti-Hamas train, but it's not really sticking.
To most uninformed people, the optics were that Hamas pulled a mean sucker punch and Israel was fighting back, but now they just see Israel hitting Palestine over and over and over and over and over and over. Joe Brandon's reaction of "Okay guys, enough now, let's not go too far" encapsulates that pretty well. There aren't many more solid-sounding defense narratives anymore for Israel, I see a lot of "Well the numbers of dead Palestinians are from the health ministry which is controlled by Hamas", I saw some "A ceasefire would mean the normalization of antisemitic violence" and the obligatory "A lot of Palestinian civilians were killed by Hamas, actually". All of these are really, really bad defenses, I can't stress enough how much weaker these are than any pro-Ukraine narratives. It doesn't help that Israel is doing dumb shit like beefing with Gigi Hadid on Instagram and making an absolute mockery of themselves.
The longer this goes on, the more time passes since the attack on Israel, the steeper the uphill battle becomes that the propaganda has to fight and they're already losing.
Israel knows it cannot defend its actions indefinitely, but it doesn't care. It's just trying to buy enough time to finish its genocide.
I am old enough to recognize that given enough time, all the crimes will be washed away.
I remember how the American public learned nothing from the Iraq War and fell for the exact same propaganda during the war in Ukraine. I have seen the condemnation and then the rehabilitation of the war criminal George W Bush. Admittedly not old enough for this, I have seen the rehabilitation of Nazism and the atrocities of Waffen SS being pinned on the Soviets. What a time to live in.
It doesn’t matter what the public thinks. In a few months when the war with China heats up, they will forget all the crimes committed in Palestine and will all turn to condemn Chinese atrocities in Xinjiang instead.
I don't agree. There is already heightened discontent in the West with the declining material conditions and the public response to the Israel-Palestine conflict is noticeably different to Ukraine-Russia. Reality still matters to an extent. When people have less to lose, they are more likely to go against the system and the status quo.
The public response is different because unlike the Donbass Republics, Palestine does not have a powerful backer like Russia to intervene in the event of an Israeli massacre. Everyone expects Palestinians to pay the ultimate price, now that it seems that Israeli military has “gotten their shit together” after the initial surprise (at least this is what it looks like for the general public), so it’s expedient to sympathize with the Palestinians knowing full well that very little will come to aid their cause.
Just wait and see how this tune will quickly change again if there is indeed an outside intervention against Israel enabling Hamas/Palestinians to actually fight back and gain grounds against the Israeli military.
If Russia had not intervened in Ukraine and allowed the Ukrainians to invade Donbass and start their ethnic cleansing, you will still hear more sympathetic voices like “Donbass separatists - caught between Ukrainian neo-Nazis and betrayed by Putin’s Russia that they supposedly trusted to protect them”. Reminder that Western presses have long condemned far right neo-Nazism in Ukraine (and also Russia on the other side) up until the Russian invasion in 2022.
What would change this? Don’t say “nothing”.
My position has been very consistent all along: the American left needs a revolutionary vanguard movement.
None of this is going to change without radically transforming the very nature of the left wing movement in America in the first place, which is firmly rooted in social democratic reformism that explicitly supports not only the imperialist project of the empire, but also a strong proponent of the electoral gradualism in domestic issues that has been completely futile in changing the national discourse.
To illustrate, the American left had completely failed to shift the needle since the Covid pandemic in 2020, we’re not just talking about universal healthcare (of which there is a majority support among the American public), we’re talking a movement so inept that it failed to even improve benefits for healthcare workers who toiled providing necessary care to countless patients throughout the pandemic.
The same applies to the failure of the BLM movement of summer 2020. It is beyond clear that without a revolutionary movement to rally behind, all the energy will be dissipated just as quickly as they had built up. If such is the mentality of the left towards domestic issues, you better believe that it’s going to be even worse for foreign policy.
We do indeed need a face to lead us. How do we keep that face from being whacked as soon as they appear?
I heard someone here yesterday talking about how the narrative doesn't matter to the global south and looks like FT has an article on it too. Here's one from RT referring to the other one. The western media narrative largely doesn't matter to over half of the world and any change in our rhetoric will probably come from pressure outside the west.
https://www.rt.com/news/585313-west-lost-global-south/
You mean as in like stop supporting Israel or as in giving up on the NATO and the Western world and join BRICS or whatever?
I think it's going to be either France or Japan, specially if they go to war against China or Iran in the future. Spain and i think Portugal have been very critical of Israel recently, same with Colombia who are going to break relations with Israel.