After I moved from Colorado back to Alabama in the fall of 1995 with my heart in shreds and my head spinning, clueless that the 4-year dark night of the soul, which had lifted in June of that year, would be followed by a 16 month-black night of the soul, which would make the dark night seem like heaven, this little poem fell out of me, which entered my thoughts this Valentine’s Day morning.
Love without Truthis mush,Truth without loveis harsh,They live together,or die.
I spent a good while yesterday wrangling with readers of a report from the Australian Caitlin Johnstone, who subscribed to my substack last year and then invited me to subscribe to hers, which I did, since I didn’t have to pay anything.
Here is the first part of Caitlin’s report, clicking the link will bring up all of it.
Ignore What Western Officials Say About Israel; Watch Their Actions InsteadContinuing To Support Israel At This Point Just Means You're A Garbage Human BeingI am so fucking done with people handwringing about October 7 while Israel has been October 7ing the Gazans every day since.I am so fucking done with people handwringing about October 7 while Israel has been October 7ing the Gazans every day since. I am so fucking done with people handwringing about October 7 while Israel has been October 7ing the Gazans every day since.❖
Four months. This has been happening for four months. If you’re still supporting Israel after four months of atrocities, then you’re just a shitty human being. After four months you’ve lost any possible claim to have overreacted to October 7 in the emotional heat of the moment, and this is just who you are as a person.
❖
If you can even excuse genocide to justify your continuing support for a nation or political party, then you can excuse literally anything. There is absolutely nothing the leaders of your political faction could possibly do that would cause you to stop supporting them. If this isn’t your red line, then you don’t have any red lines.What this means is that your politics are not actually guided by any interest in truth or ethics; they are guided solely and exclusively by arbitrary team loyalty. You cheer for your side for the exact same reason someone born in Texas cheers for the Dallas Cowboys. You might make up some grander reasons for your support which involve appeals to truth and morality, but you’ve made a liar of yourself and proved those reasons false by the fact that you are currently excusing an actual, literal genocide.❖
Four months. This has been happening for four months. If you’re still supporting Israel after four months of atrocities, then you’re just a shitty human being. After four months you’ve lost any possible claim to have overreacted to October 7 in the emotional heat of the moment, and this is just who you are as a person.
❖
If you can even excuse genocide to justify your continuing support for a nation or political party, then you can excuse literally anything. There is absolutely nothing the leaders of your political faction could possibly do that would cause you to stop supporting them. If this isn’t your red line, then you don’t have any red lines.What this means is that your politics are not actually guided by any interest in truth or ethics; they are guided solely and exclusively by arbitrary team loyalty. You cheer for your side for the exact same reason someone born in Texas cheers for the Dallas Cowboys. You might make up some grander reasons for your support which involve appeals to truth and morality, but you’ve made a liar of yourself and proved those reasons false by the fact that you are currently excusing an actual, literal genocide.❖
Four months. This has been happening for four months. If you’re still supporting Israel after four months of atrocities, then you’re just a shitty human being. After four months you’ve lost any possible claim to have overreacted to October 7 in the emotional heat of the moment, and this is just who you are as a person.
❖
If you can even excuse genocide to justify your continuing support for a nation or political party, then you can excuse literally anything. There is absolutely nothing the leaders of your political faction could possibly do that would cause you to stop supporting them. If this isn’t your red line, then you don’t have any red lines.What this means is that your politics are not actually guided by any interest in truth or ethics; they are guided solely and exclusively by arbitrary team loyalty. You cheer for your side for the exact same reason someone born in Texas cheers for the Dallas Cowboys. You might make up some grander reasons for your support which involve appeals to truth and morality, but you’ve made a liar of yourself and proved those reasons false by the fact that you are currently excusing an actual, literal genocide...
Sloan BashinskyThis article was in my newsfeed this morning, by someone who lived in Gaza and whose family is still there. The last sentence is, "Hamas is not fighting Israel. They’re destroying Gaza."Hamas Built Tunnels Beneath My Family’s Home in Gaza. Now It Lies in Ruin alongside countless other homes in northern Gaza.
JEHAD AL-SAFTAWIJEHAD AL-SAFTAWI IS THE AUTHOR OF MY GAZA: A CITY IN PHOTOGRAPHS AND IS FOUNDER OF REFUGEEYE, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION WHICH SUPPORTS REFUGEE JOURNALISTS.It’s been seven years since I escaped my embattled city of Gaza and came to the U.S. On Thanksgiving, my mother sent me a photo of a felled 16-ft. tree in southern Gaza, where my family has been sheltering these last weeks. Ten of my relatives are standing on asphalt, surrounding the trunk, and one of them is hacking off its limbs. It’s impossible to obtain cooking gas, and this tree is now the firewood that will allow them to prepare their next meal.
Since Hamas’s atrocious attacks on Oct. 7—leaving around 1,200 people dead, the largest mass killing of Jews on a single day since the Holocaust—the systems that supply Gaza’s food, water, and medicine are in urgent decline as Israel carries out its ongoing bombardment of Gaza in return. At least 27,000 Palestinians have died since, thousands of whom are reportedly Hamas fighters, and some 1.7 million of Gaza’s 2.3 million people displaced along with tens of thousands of Israelis by ongoing rocket fire from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Much of Gaza is now reduced to rubble. But the sense of disorder and emergency in the Strip today stretches much further into the past.
Since Hamas’s violent takeover of Gaza in 2007, the bustling and beautiful streets I knew have been dominated by terrorist chaos. Hamas is driven by an ideological stand originating in the concept of annihilating the state of Israel and replacing it with an Islamic Palestinian one. In striving to make this a reality, Hamas has continued to normalize violence and militarization in every aspect of public and private life in Gaza. They have in the process obliterated the chances of a successful Palestinian state alongside Israel, even if the prospect of one had increasingly looked dim amid successive Israeli governments that worked against that.
We lived in my father Imad’s family building and saved money for nearly 18 years until we were able to build our own house in the north of Gaza. The first sign that Hamas was building tunnels underneath our house came in July 2013, while the house was under construction. Our soon-to-be new neighbor, Um Yazid Salha, got in touch with my mother Saadia to ask why my brother Hamza and I always come to the site after midnight.
The two-story construction site was surrounded by a wall and two gates. And every night we were all in the apartment at our family building, where the door closes and locks at 10 p.m. without fail. “No one comes or goes after 10,” my mother told Um Yazid.
The next day I went to the construction site with my mother and Hamza. After a quick look around, we saw nothing amiss. But when we examined the site more closely, we found several concrete slabs in the area under the interior staircase, each about 1.5-ft. long. We also found an area with newly moved soil to the right of our house and the wall surrounding it.
My brother Hamza and I dug a depth of 1.5 ft. in that soil as our mother looked on. We would soon hit a metal gate, sealed with a lock. We had no idea what it was or why it was there. Hamza and I quickly covered the area with soil again and went directly to our neighbor’s house.
Ahead of our visit, Um Yazid told us that every few nights she would look out the windows of her four-story building at the wall surrounding our house and see the arrival of a medium transport vehicle. People would exit the van and hang a large piece of plastic tarp to obscure what they were doing. They would hear sounds of loading and unloading and feel the vibrations of digging coming from the empty piece of land behind our houses. She suspected someone was digging a tunnel.
The day after we inspected the house, Um Yazid called to say that the men had returned in the night. My mother didn’t want me to go, but I put on my clothes and headed alone to the unfinished home. When I reached the iron door of the house, I began to hear the movement of people inside the house. I knocked on the door. A masked person opened the door and asked me to step back a bit. Then he closed the door behind him and asked who I was. I defiantly told him that I am the owner of the house. “Who are you?” I asked.
Meeting masked men is something we are used to in different aspects of Gazan life. We argued. I told him my uncle, who was a member of Hamas and prosecutor in its government, would stop them from building a tunnel. The masked man insisted they would continue as they pleased. He said I should not be afraid and that this would just be a small closed room to remain buried underground. No one can enter or exit. He said that only in the case of an Israeli ground invasion in this area and the displacement of residents would these rooms be used to supply weapons.
“We don’t want to live above a stockpile of weapons,” I told him, just before he forced me to leave.
Construction continued, and Um Yazid continued to report to us about late night activity. Hamza and I visited every few weeks, always finding the same gate, never sure what we could do, or what was really happening behind it. Our uncle assured us we had nothing to fear.
In February 2014, I got married and left my family’s house. The same year, my mother, Hamza, and my two young sisters moved to the newly finished house. Before they did, Hamza and I dug again and this time found nothing but sand for 3 ft., then a large cement slab. We covered it over, believing Hamas had finally closed off the “room” at our uncle’s insistence.
In the years since, my family or their neighbors heard sounds or movements from time to time. They wondered sometimes if there really were tunnels, if they were active. My family was too afraid to speak about this with anyone, so it was our secret. It felt shameful even though we knew we were deeply opposed to whatever Hamas had done on the other side of that cement slab.
When something goes unspoken for so long, it begins to feel impossible that the truth will ever be known. I always looked forward to a time in the future when my family and others like us would be allowed to speak about these tunnels, about the perilous life Hamas has forced upon Gazans. Now that I am determined to speak openly about it, I don’t know if it even matters.
My family evacuated to the south shortly after Oct. 7. Months after, we received photos of our house and neighborhood, both of which are in ruins. I may never know if the house was destroyed by Israeli strikes or fighting between Hamas and Israel. But the result is the same. Our home, and far too many in our community, were flattened alongside priceless history and memories.
And this is the legacy of Hamas. They began destroying my family home in 2013 when they built tunnels beneath it. They continued to threaten our safety for a decade—we always knew we might have to vacate at a moment’s notice. We always feared violence. Gazans deserve a true Palestinian government, which supports its citizens’ interests, not terrorists carrying out their own plans. Hamas is not fighting Israel. They’re destroying Gaza.
CarbonCopyRight the old "Hamas using children as Human Shields" bullshit story. It's GENOCIDE AND THERE ISN'T ANY EXCUSE!
Sloan Bashinsky
Based on everything I have seen reported, it looks to me that Hamas used all of the people of Gaza as human shields.
Mr. Raven
Whisper from the trees
Shut up you Zionist liar. Get your hands out my pocket using my tax dollars to fund your horrific mass murder of children,. Leave the U.S. and take your ZOG agents and Nikki Haley with you and never come back!
Sloan Bashinsky
Heh, I would love to see Nikki Haley, and Donald Trump, Kari Lake, Sarah Palin, Majorie Taylor Green, etc., leave and never come back, and they could take Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and Hillary Clinton with them.
Jeck
Interesting. Is this disdain for Hamas common among Palestinians? What do you suppose the odds are that this is propaganda written by Mossad/IDF agent(s)? How much of the tunnel system was built by Israel prior to Gaza being what it became?
FWIW, story doesn't fully pass the sniff test. But hey what do I know...
Mr. Raven
Whisper from the trees
He's a lying Hasbara Zionist scum fuck.
Sloan Bashinsky
I don’t know how the people of Gaza feel about Hamas, but I know if I lived in Gaza right now, I would not care for Hamas nor for Israel, and I would wish they would both go away.
Mr. Raven
Whisper from the trees
Hamas kills people like you! Good!
Sloan Bashinsky
Actually, I’m a recovering Southern Baptist and recovering Episcopalian :-), who thinks the leaders of Hamas and Israel, and President Biden, should be hanged :-)
gypsy33
Liar. I’ve seen your pro-Zio comments before. Fuck off.
Sloan Bashinsky
My recollection is I take Israel’s side is when people say the Nazi holocaust never happened. And, I have said it’s a shame Western Europe and America didn’t offer sanctuary to the European Jews after WWII, and maybe there would be no State of Israel in Palestine.
My Jewish great grandfather on my father’s side came to America in the latter 1800s, family historians say, and he married a Southern Baptist woman, and they raised their children in the Baptist church, and he attended church services but did not convert. My entire family were Baptist until my mother became Episcopalian and took me with her to that church. Now, I’m a recovering Southern Baptist and Episcopalian, who wonders when is he ever not in church? My great grandfather's family in East Prussia or Western Poland, as family historians tell it, were killed by the Nazis.
As for taking the Zionist’s side, in the sense you mean, I think they were really stupid to let Hamas bait them into destroying Gaza by trying destroying Hamas. and I think their leaders should be hanged, I think President Biden should be hanged for helping Israel destroy Gaza, and I think Hama’s leaders should be hanged for baiting Israel to do in Gaza what they wanted israel to do there.
russian_bot
That some MSM outlet is it not? And you ask reasonable people to believe anything MSM publish re genocide supported by the government that manages said MSM? You can't be serious!!!
gypsy33
That story is COMPLETELY implausible. The author is speaking English with an Amerikkkan idiom.
I know native Arabic-speakers and their English sounds NOTHING like that.
But nice try, hasbarist! đŸ˜‚
Sloan Bashinsky
I am aware it might be propaganda, just as I see plenty of pro Hamas propaganda from Caitlin and her readers. That’s why I think it's really important for the people of Gaza to be able to SAFELY tell journalist how they feel about Hamas, which has not allowed free speech on that topic, and why I think it’s really important for people to get it that Hamas hoped the Oct 7 raid would cause Israel to respond as it did and become a pariah state, which is what has happened, except America will not abandon Israel, in my opinion, because the Bible thumpers in America won’t stand for it, and because they want Israel to wipe out Islam in the Middle East. I think President Biden should be hanged for helping Israel destroy Gaza, and I think the men leading Israel and Hamas should be hanged.
This below was in my apple news feed this Valentine’s Day morning, and while I agree with it, I wonder if it also is Hamas propaganda, since it does not give Hamas credit for its brilliant bait.
MSNBC: Opinion | Reading between the lines of Biden’s tepid criticism of Israe
For months President Joe Biden’s adm inistration has used leaks to the media to communicate the president’s apparent unhappiness with Israel’s treatment of Gazans as Israel has responded to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. In recent days, Biden himself has finally begun to more openly criticize Israel’s military operation. But the language he’s using subtly lets Israel off the hook for its ongoing atrocities.
Speaking at a White House news conference alongside Jordan’s King Abdullah II on Monday, Biden spoke sympathetically about the suffering Israel has inflicted upon Gaza in retaliation for Hamas' war crimes. “Too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children. And hundreds of thousands have no access to food, water or other basic services,” Biden said in his opening statement. “Many families have lost not just one but many relatives and cannot mourn for them or even bury them because it’s not safe to do so. It’s heart-breaking. Every innocent life in Gaza is a tragedy, just as every innocent life lost in Israel is a tragedy, as well. We pray for those lives taken — both Israeli and Palestinian — and for the grieving families left behind.”
Biden’s statement downplays and omits Israel’s role — and the U.S.’ complicity — in causing horrific civilian suffering in Gaza. He noticeably uses the passive voice to describe Palestinian hardship and death. For example, he refers to “Palestinians killed,” instead of saying Israel killed them. Biden also laments that Gazans don’t have access to food, but he doesn't call out Israel’s policy of starving the entire enclave’s population. In Biden’s telling, Gazans have just “lost” family. But human rights observers have said Israel’s airstrikes on civilian infrastructure have instantly wiped out families of multiple generations. Of course, any reasonable viewer could deduce from Biden’s words why Gazans are dying. Israel has been killing them with its weapons and with its manufactured humanitarian crisis. But language matters. And by eliding the actors behind the killing — and the brutal methods that those actors are using — Biden obscures the misconduct underpinning the mass death unfolding before us.
Consider also Biden’s use of the word “tragedy” to characterize the deaths of innocent civilians. (“Tragedy” is a word that’s also been used by other administration officials to describe the unconscionable death toll in Gaza.) The loss of innocent life in Gaza is indeed a tragedy, but the word connotes a natural calamity and suggests some fate of cosmic origins has befallen Palestinians. With every repetition of that word, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s administration and the Israel Defense Forces’ culpability recede further from view. The invocation of tragedy also implies that the death rate in Gaza is a natural byproduct of a painful but necessary war, and that Biden’s ability to alter the course of events is limited. But wars can be waged in different ways, and, with American money and weapons, Israel is knowingly using ruthless tactics that are wiping out Palestinian life and civilization en masse.
Biden also soft-pedaled the nature of what’s transpiring in Gaza in his other recent instance of criticism of Israel last week. At a news conference, Biden said “the conduct of the response in Gaza, in the Gaza Strip, has been over the top” and expressed concern that “there are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying. And it’s got to stop.” Again, Biden managed to avoid naming whose behavior is over the top and what specifically makes it over the top.
The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is approaching 30,000, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which has consistently reported that most of the people who have died are civilians. (NBC hasn't independently confirmed those numbers; human rights observers say that historically the ministry's estimates are credible.) Biden should describe this not just as a tragedy but as an intolerable and ongoing violation of international law. Of course, using that kind of language might then compel him to do something about it, such as declining to continue to arm Israel or shield it at the United Nations, or admitting that defunding the U.N.'s Palestinian refugee agency is the wrong choice. Biden’s soft language, however, allows the administration to sound morally upstanding without having to be morally upstanding.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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