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thewitchoftheweed · 10 months

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i’m a lifelong UFO weirdo so here’s some highlights of the House Oversight Committee’s public hearing on UAPs/UFOs:

- There’s no chance these craft are from secret US government testing programs because they have specific testing fields that assets in development cannot leave without significant notice and military approval.

- Other world governments also know about this phenomenon. A declassified treaty included parameters for joint international de-escalation in the event of a “malevolent UAP event.”

- All of the craft defy our current understanding of physics. They also look real weird. Descriptions given include a floating metal sphere with no visible propulsion and a black cube encased in a clear sphere.

- Nonhuman biologics have been recovered with crashes. Documentation of this exists.

- Nonhumans are no more infallible than us and also experience “mission failures,” which result in occasional manned and unmanned crashes.

- The first documented UFO incidents by the US military predate most of our advanced programs (1940s).

- UAPs have retaliated against humans, but the how’s and why’s were not given.

- There is a section of government that has been aggressively covering up the existence of UAPs/nonhuman remains, and they have used violence/the threat of violence to silence witnesses.

- There is a list of witnesses, which will be provided to the committee in a closed door session, that have firsthand knowledge/interaction with these craft. There is also a list of US defense contractors in possession of UAPs that is also being given to Congress in the closed door session.

- UAPs are difficult to document, even with our current technology, because they can shut down information collection systems in our most advanced planes. One photo of a UAP shot down recently had to be taken manually by the pilot.

- UAP encounters are now so common that they’re included as part of military pilots’ pre-flight briefings.

- “Has the US government contacted or communicated with nonhumans?” (long pause) “That is not a question I’m allowed to answer publicly.”

- At the end of the hearing: “We’ve made history here today.”

- Congress intends to follow up on this matter, and will invoke specific laws to bypass security classifications if necessary.

#current events #us politics #i guess #ufos #ufo news #uap #this is and i cannot stress this enough #a matter of congressional record now #and is beginning the process of discovery and disclosure #government moves slow but #this is the beginning #and i honestly never thought i would see it

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deadpresidents · 2 months

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Thoughts of the state of the union address?

I thought President Biden was great and I hope we get that version of Biden on the campaign trail.

But I think that State of the Union was a perfect illustration of how Donald Trump has so blatantly shattered any sense of decorum in American politics. When Rep. Joe Wilson interrupted President Obama during Obama's health care speech to a Joint Session of Congress in 2009, it was absolutely shocking. Even Wilson's fellow Republicans criticized him for it at the time. But now it's just expected that the President is going to be heckled -- not by protesters in the gallery, but by elected members of Congress. And it's become acceptable. I mean, Marjorie Taylor Greene showed up to the SOTU dressed like Q-Anon Willy Wonka, and made the entire thing into a spectacle. It's gross. And there's a direct connection between that type of behavior and Trump's rise in politics.

If this was 2006, Joe Biden -- a traditionalist who revered the institution of the Senate -- would not have gleefully set traps throughout a speech just so he could smack down Republican hecklers. But that's not the country we live in anymore, so he has to do that. We had Biden basically tricking the MAGA Republicans into openly displaying their extremism on numerous occasions, and cutting promos like he's The Rock taunting Cody Rhodes about WrestleMania. Nobody is even pretending to be interested in bipartisanship, and I'm sorry but nothing gets done in this country without some bipartisan collaboration, so it's really unfortunate that we've fallen this far this quickly. If there was a graph demonstrating the nation's descent into total shitshow, the line would dramatically nosedive beginning in 2015 and there's no question about the reason why.

#State of the Union #President Biden #Joe Biden #2024 Election #Politics #2024 State of the Union Address #SOTU

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 8 months

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

SEP 22, 2023

The Senate has confirmed three top defense leaders. Last night it confirmed Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr. to replace Army General Mark A. Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when he retires at the end of the month. Today, it confirmed General Randy A. George as Army chief of staff and General Eric M. Smith as Marine Corps commandant.

The Senate filled the positions at the top of our military by working around the hold extremist senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) has put on more than 300 military promotions, allegedly because he objects to the government’s policy of providing leave and travel allowance for service members who have to travel to obtain abortions.

Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post focused on the House Republicans today, though, when she wrote: “The GOP completely gone off its rocker—incapable of passing House spending, ranting and raving at AG, cooking up ludicrous and baseless impeachment, unable to greet Zelensky with joint session. This is not normal. This is egregious. You'd think the reporting would reflect it.”

Indeed, the House Republicans remain unable even to agree to talk about funding the government, let alone actually passing the appropriations bills Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to four months ago. Today, right-wing extremists in the House blocked a procedural vote over a Pentagon funding bill, keeping what is normally an easily passed bipartisan bill from even reaching the floor for debate. McCarthy acknowledged to reporters that he is frustrated. “This is a whole new concept of individuals who just want to burn the whole place down. It doesn’t work.”

The extremists do indeed appear unconcerned about the effects of their refusal to fund the government, and since they have the five or six votes they need to sink the measures McCarthy wants to pass with only Republican votes, this handful of representatives are the ones deciding whether the government will shut down.

McCarthy could pass clean funding bills through the House whenever he wishes, but he refuses. To do so would mean working with Democrats, and that would spark a vote to throw him out of the speakership. And so, rather than keep the members in Washington, D.C., to work on the appropriations bills over the weekend, McCarthy recognized he did not have the votes he needs and sent them home.

The extremists are bolstered by former president Donald Trump, who posted on his social media platform today that the Republicans in Congress “can and must defund all aspects of Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Government…. This is also the last chance to defund these political prosecutions against me and other Patriots. They failed on the debt limit, but they must not fail now. Use the power of the purse and defend the Country!”

Experts say shutting down the government would not, in fact, end the former president’s legal troubles, but he is actually doing more than that here: he is trying to assert dominance over the country. As Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said: “Let’s be clear about what the former president is saying here. House Republicans should shut down the government unless the prosecutions against him are shut down. He would deny paychecks to millions of working families & devastate the US economy, all in the service of himself.”

Extremist leader Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) responded to Trump’s statement with his own: “Trump Opposes the Continuing Resolution” to fund the government,” he wrote. “Hold the line.” Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch noted: “House Republicans refuse to fund the government to protect Donald Trump.”

Trump’s accusation that President Biden is weaponizing the Justice Department against him and others who tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election is the opposite of what has really happened. Not only has Biden stayed scrupulously out of the Justice Department’s business—leaving in place the Trump-appointed leader of the investigation into Biden’s son Hunter, for example—but also we received more proof yesterday that it was Trump, not Biden, who weaponized the Justice Department against his enemies.

Nora Dennehy, who abruptly resigned from former special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, explained in her confirmation hearing to Connecticut’s state supreme court yesterday that she quit because Trump’s Department of Justice was tainted by politics. Before joining the probe, she said, “I had been taught and spent my entire career at [the] Department of Justice conducting any investigation in an objective and apolitical manner.”

But Trump and his loyalists expected Durham’s investigation to prove that there was a “deep state” conspiracy against him, and then–attorney general William Barr seemed to be working to support that fantasy, even though there was no evidence of it (as shown by the fact the investigation ultimately fizzled). Barr was, she thought, violating DOJ guidelines in his public comments about the investigation and in his consideration of releasing an interim report before the 2020 election.

“I simply couldn’t be part of it,” Dannehy said. “So I resigned.”

The resistance of the extremists to McCarthy’s leadership is spilling over into foreign affairs as well. Today, Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky was in Washington, D.C., where he met with President Biden at the White House and with leaders at the Pentagon, and spoke to a closed-door session for the Senate. But he did not speak to the House of Representatives. While McCarthy met with him privately, the speaker maintained that “we just didn’t have time” for him to address the House.

As part of their demands, House extremists want to cut funding for Ukraine’s defense. This would, of course, work to strengthen Russian president Vladimir Putin’s hand in his war against Ukraine. Earlier this month, former Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan told MSNBC that it is “absolutely essential” to Putin that Trump win back the White House in 2024. “I think it is Putin's main lifeline in order to find some way to salvage what has been a debacle in Ukraine for him," Brennan said. "If Trump is able to return to the White House...Putin could have a like-minded individual that he can work with, detrimental to U.S. interests certainly and detrimental to Western interests overall.” The intelligence community assesses that Putin worked to help Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and is pushing pro-Russia and anti-Ukraine propaganda now.

Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III assured Zelensky that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine and work with allies and partners to make sure it has the weapons it needs. Lara Seligman of Politico reported today that the Pentagon will continue to fund Ukraine operations even if there is a government shutdown. Military activities deemed crucial to national security can be exempted from being shuttered during a government shutdown.

And finally, 92-year-old Rupert Murdoch announced today that he will be stepping down as chair of his media empire, including both Fox Corporation, which includes the Fox News Channel (FNC), and News Corporation, which owns the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, among other newspapers. In 1996 the Australian-born mogul launched the Fox News Channel with media specialist Roger Ailes, who had packaged Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon in 1968 by presenting him to audiences in highly scripted television appearances.

The Fox News Channel initially presented news from a conservative viewpoint, but over time its opinion shows, delivered as if they were news, came to dominate the channel. Those shows presented a simple narrative in which Americans—overwhelmingly white and rural—wanted the government to leave them alone but “socialists” who wanted social welfare programs demanded their tax dollars. Isolated in the fantasy world of FNC, its viewers became such fanatic adherents to right-wing politics that FNC wholeheartedly trumpeted Trump’s Big Lie after he lost the 2020 presidential election because viewers turned away from FNC when some of its personalities acknowledged that Biden had won..

Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters for America, said today that “Murdoch created a uniquely destructive force in American democracy and public life, one that ushered in an era of division where racist and post-truth politics thrive.” Margaret Sullivan, formerly the Washington Post’s media critic, wrote in The Guardian that FNC was “a shameless propaganda outfit, reaping massive profits even as it attacked core democratic values such as tolerance, truth and fair elections.” Murdoch, she wrote, wreaked “untold havoc on American democracy.”

Murdoch sees it differently. In his resignation letter, he attacked “bureaucracies” who wanted to “silence those who would question their provenance and purpose” and “elites” who “have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class.” “Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth,” he wrote.

Forbes estimates that their media empire has enabled Murdoch and his family to amass a fortune of more than $17 billion.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #political #Media Matters #corrupt GOP #anti-democratic GOP #Big Lie #government shutdown

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whenweallvote · 2 months

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On This Day in 1965: Just one week after Bloody Sunday, Former President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress to urge the passage of voting rights legislation.

The Voting Rights Act was signed into law five months later, protecting voting rights for every American — but voter suppression and attacks on our democracy still threaten our access to the ballot box today.

This year alone, at least 284 bills restricting voter access have been introduced across the country. In 14 states, at least 17 new voter suppression laws will be in effect for the 2024 General Election.

We need federal voting rights protections to ensure all Americans can freely exercise our right to vote. Voting rights are on the ballot this year. Make sure you’re registered to vote NOW at weall.vote/register.

#on this day #OTD #bloody sunday #LBJ #president lyndon b johnson #lyndon b johnson #voting rights #voting rights legislation #voting rights act #VRA #voter suppression #register to vote #vote #voting

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todaysdocument · 5 months

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H.J. Res. 75, Proposing an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution

Record Group 233: Records of the U.S. House of RepresentativesSeries: Bill Files of the Committee on the Judiciary

68th CONGRESS, 1st SESSION. H.J. RES. 75 IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. DECEMBER 13, 1923. Mr. ANTHONY introduced the following joint resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary and ordered to be printed. JOINT RESOLUTION Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States. 1 Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives 2 of the United States of America in Congress assembled 3 (two-third of each House concurring therein), That the 4 following article is proposed as an amendment to the Con- 5 stitution of the United States which shall be valid, to all 6 intents and purposes, as part of the Constitution when 7 ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the several 8 States: 9 ARTICLE XX. 10 "Men an women shall have equal rights throughout 11 the United States and every place subject to its jurisdiction. 12 "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by 13 appropriate legislation."

#archivesgov #December 13 #1923 #1920s #era #equal rights admendment #equal rights

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mydaddywiki · 7 months

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Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.

Physique: Stocky build Height: 6'3" (1.91 m)

Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf Jr. KCB (August 22, 1934 – December 27, 2012) was a United States Army general. While serving as the commander of United States Central Command, he led all coalition forces in the Gulf War against Ba'athist Iraq. Schwarzkopf retired shortly after the end of the war and undertook a number of philanthropic ventures, only occasionally stepping into the political spotlight before his death from complications of pneumonia in late 2012 at the age of 78. Schwarzkopf was survived by his wife Brenda and their three children.

The Trenton, NJ native was one of the memorable things about the Gulf War, at least for me. Just by the look of him, I think the 6-foot-3-inch 240-pounder with grim determined eyes, Schwarzkopf might have been a hell of a good fuck. And with nicknames like 'Stormin’ Norman' and 'The Bear,' it really helps the fantasy. Schwarzkopf came home to a hero’s welcome, appearing at a ticker-tape parade up Broadway, the Pegasus Parade at the Kentucky Derby in Louisville and an unusual joint session of Congress, where he received a standing ovation. Even Queen Elizabeth II awarded him a knighthood. And I would have offered him 'the goods' if given the opportunity.

Schwarzkopf was a burly highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who was easily angered considered an exceptional leader. But they miss the gentler man who listened to Pavarotti, Willie Nelson and Bob Dylan; who loved hunting, fishing and ballet; and, like any soldier, called home twice a week from the war zone. Awww… now I feel bad for wanting to fuck him. Not really.

#Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.

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mojave-pete · 9 months

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@realDonaldTrump said 12 hrs ago on TS:

Big News! Mike Pence said, “ I met with the Parliamentarian of the Senate, Elizabeth MacDonough, to discuss the procedures for the upcoming joint session on January 6. She told me that Congress always receives miscellaneous slates of electors every four years.” Greg Kelly, “That’s huge! A game changer in terms of information. It really turns upside down everything the Democrats said about January 6th, and this latest Federal Indictment.” DROP THE FAKE CASE!

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maaarine · 3 months

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France makes abortion a constitutional right in historic Versailles vote (Kim Willsher, The Guardian, March 04 2024)

"The French parliament has enshrined abortion as a constitutional right at a historic joint session at the Palace of Versailles.

Out of 925 MPs and senators eligible to vote, 780 supported the amendment, which will give women the “guaranteed freedom” to choose an abortion.

There was thunderous applause in the chamber as the result was announced on Monday; in central Paris, the Eiffel Tower was illuminated to mark the occasion.

The measure had already been passed by the upper and lower houses, the Sénat and the Assemblée Nationale, but final approval by parliamentarians at the joint session at Versailles was needed to effect constitutional change.

The prime minister, Gabriel Attal, told those gathered in the opulent Congress Hall in the palace’s Midi wing: “We are haunted by the suffering and memory of so many women who were not free. We owe a moral debt [to all the women who] suffered in their flesh.

“Today, the present must respond to history. To enshrine this right in our constitution is to close the door on the tragedy of the past and its trail of suffering and pain. It will further prevent reactionaries from attacking women.

“Let’s not forget that the train of oppression can happen again. Let’s act to ensure that it doesn’t, that it never comes this day.”"

#article #weaker sex

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roco2808 · 4 months

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“If we say nothing about Israel’s brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it.”

If we say nothing about Israel’s brazen slaughter of Palestinians, even as it is livestreamed into the most private recesses of our personal lives, we are complicit in it. Something in our moral selves will be altered forever. Are we going to simply stand by and watch while homes, hospitals, refugee camps, schools, universities, archives are bombed, a million people displaced, and dead children pulled out from under the rubble? The borders of Gaza are sealed. People have nowhere to go. They have no shelter, no food, no water. The United Nations says more than half the population is starving. And still they are being bombed relentlessly. Are we going to once again watch a whole people being dehumanised to the point where their annihilation does not matter?

The project of dehumanising Palestinians did not begin with Benyamin Netanyahu and his crew—it began decades ago.

In 2002, on the first anniversary of September 11 2001, I delivered a lecture called “Come September” in the United States in which I spoke about other anniversaries of September 11—the 1973 CIA-backed coup against President Salvador Allende in Chile on that auspicious date, and then the speech on September 11, 1990, of George W. Bush, Sr., then US President, to a joint session of Congress, announcing his government’s decision to go to war against Iraq. And then I spoke about Palestine. I will read this section out and you will see that if I hadn’t told you it was written 21 years ago, you’d think it was about today.

September 11th has a tragic resonance in the Middle East, too. On the 11th of September 1922, ignoring Arab outrage, the British government proclaimed a mandate in Palestine, a follow-up to the 1917 Balfour Declaration which imperial Britain issued, with its army massed outside the gates of Gaza. The Balfour Declaration promised European Zionists a national home for Jewish people. (At the time, the Empire on which the Sun Never Set was free to snatch and bequeath national homelands like a school bully distributes marbles.)

How carelessly imperial power vivisected ancient civilisations. Palestine and Kashmir are imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world. Both are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today.

In 1937, Winston Churchill said of the Palestinians, I quote, “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.” That set the trend for the Israeli State’s attitude towards the Palestinians.

In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir said, “Palestinians do not exist.”

Her successor, Prime Minister Levi Eschol said, “What are Palestinians? When I came here (to Palestine), there were 250,000 non-Jews, mainly Arabs and Bedouins. It was a desert, more than underdeveloped. Nothing.” Prime Minister Menachem Begin called Palestinians “two-legged beasts”.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir called them “grasshoppers” who could be crushed. This is the language of Heads of State, not the words of ordinary people.

Thus began that terrible myth about the Land without a People for a People without a Land.

In 1947, the U.N. formally partitioned Palestine and allotted 55 per cent of Palestine’s land to the Zionists. Within a year, they had captured 76 per cent. On the 14th of May 1948 the State of Israel was declared. Minutes after the declaration, the United States recognized Israel. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan. The Gaza Strip came under Egyptian military control, and Palestine formally ceased to exist except in the minds and hearts of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian people who became refugees.

In 1967, Israel occupied the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Over the decades there have been uprisings, wars, intifadas. Tens of thousands have lost their lives. Accords and treaties have been signed. Cease-fires declared and violated. But the bloodshed doesn’t end.

Palestine still remains illegally occupied. Its people live in inhuman conditions, in virtual Bantustans, where they are subjected to collective punishments, 24-hour curfews, where they are humiliated and brutalized on a daily basis. They never know when their homes will be demolished, when their children will be shot, when their precious trees will be cut, when their roads will be closed, when they will be allowed to walk down to the market to buy food and medicine. And when they will not. They live with no semblance of dignity. With not much hope in sight. They have no control over their lands, their security, their movement, their communication, their water supply. So when accords are signed, and words like “autonomy” and even “statehood” bandied about, it’s always worth asking: What sort of autonomy? What sort of State? What sort of rights will its citizens have? Young Palestinians who cannot control their anger turn themselves into human bombs and haunt Israel’s streets and public places, blowing themselves up, killing ordinary people, injecting terror into daily life, and eventually hardening both societies’ suspicion and mutual hatred of each other. Each bombing invites merciless reprisal and even more hardship on Palestinian people. But then suicide bombing is an act of individual despair, not a revolutionary tactic.

Although Palestinian attacks strike terror into Israeli citizens, they provide the perfect cover for the Israeli government’s daily incursions into Palestinian territory, the perfect excuse for old-fashioned, nineteenth-century colonialism, dressed up as a new-fashioned, 21st century “war”. Israel’s staunchest political and military ally is and always has been the US.

The US government has blocked, along with Israel, almost every UN resolution that sought a peaceful, equitable solution to the conflict. It has supported almost every war that Israel has fought. When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes. And every year Israel receives several billion dollars from the United States—taxpayers’ money.

Today every bomb that is dropped by Israel on the civilian population, every tank, and every bullet has the United States’ name on it. None of this would happen if the US wasn’t backing it wholeheartedly. All of us saw what happened at the meeting of the UN Security Council on December 8 when 13 member states voted for a ceasefire and the US voted against it. The disturbing video of the US Deputy Ambassador, a Black American, raising his hand to veto the resolution is burned into our brains. Some bitter commentators on the social media have called it Intersectional Imperialism.

Reading through the bureaucratese, what the US seemed to be saying is: Finish the Job. But Do it Kindly.

What lessons should we draw from this tragic conflict? Is it really impossible for Jewish people who suffered so cruelly themselves—more cruelly perhaps than any other people in history—to understand the vulnerability and the yearning of those whom they have displaced?

Does extreme suffering always kindle cruelty? What hope does this leave the human race with? What will happen to the Palestinian people in the event of a victory? When a nation without a state eventually proclaims a state, what kind of state will it be? What horrors will be perpetrated under its flag? Is it a separate state that we should be fighting for or, the rights to a life of liberty and dignity for everyone regardless of their ethnicity or religion?

Palestine was once a secular bulwark in the Middle East. But now the weak, undemocratic, by all accounts corrupt but avowedly nonsectarian PLO, is losing ground to Hamas, which espouses an overtly sectarian ideology and fights in the name of Islam. To quote from their manifesto: “we will be its soldiers and the firewood of its fire, which will burn the enemies”. The world is called upon to condemn suicide bombers. But can we ignore the long road they have journeyed on before they have arrived at this destination?

September 11, 1922 to September 11, 2002—80 years is a long time to have been waging war. Is there some advice the world can give the people of Palestine? Should they just take Golda Meir’s suggestion and make a real effort not to exist?”

The idea of the erasure, the annihilation, of Palestinians is being clearly articulated by Israeli political and military officials.

A US lawyer who has brought a case against the Biden administration for its “failure to prevent genocide”—which is a crime, too—spoke of how rare it is for genocidal intent to be so clearly and publicly articulated. Once they have achieved that goal, perhaps the plan is to have museums showcasing Palestinian culture and handicrafts, restaurants serving ethnic Palestinian food, maybe a Sound and Light show of how lively Old Gaza used to be—in the new Gaza Harbour at the head of the Ben Gurion canal project, which is supposedly being planned to rival the Suez Canal. Allegedly contracts for offshore drilling are already being signed.

Twenty-one years ago, when I delivered “Come September” in New Mexico, there was a kind of omertà in the US around Palestine. Those who spoke about it paid a huge price for doing so. Today the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. Capitalism is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say, and how they may or may not think. A shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education.

Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretence of Free Speech or public morality. A “war” that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of a genocide is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims, the colonisers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the US, to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those questioning it are Jewish themselves.

It’s mind-bending. Even Israel—where dissident Israeli citizens like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions—does not police speech in the way the US does (although that is rapidly changing, too). In the US, to speak of Intifada—uprising, resistance—in this case against genocide, against your own erasure—is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews.

The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.”

Arundhati Roy

#free gaza #gaza strip #gazaunderattack #gaza genocide #news on gaza #war on gaza

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