AI-generated questions on this post on the elongated muskrat's own platform indicate that the ghastly Gaza video 47 released is so far over the top even computers suspect it might be satirical.
Now that the West Bank is getting the Gaza treatment, we should all be concerned by this monument to the moral and aesthetic ugliness that AI was designed to create. Watching the video that 47 posted on "his" social media platform made me feel I had traveled back in time to do political theatre on 4th of July with the In Spite of Life players in West Athens, Maine. No satirical play we ever came up with exceeded this AI monstrosity in terms of hubris, ghoulishness, or over the top symbolism.
To name just a few: a tanner, slimmer, smiling elongated muskrat stuffs his face watching scantily clad belly dancers with Hamas-style male heads. Golden mylar balloons of the sort seen at children's birthday parties celebrate 47's name/brand and lots of dollar signs. Glittering seas, sands, cruise ships, and a casino sanitize the mountain of martyrs slaughtered to make Gaza safe for international capitalism.
Interesting is news that the audience on Truth Social was not impressed.
When I say the West Bank is getting the Gaza treatment I mean that for the first time in 20 years tanks rolled into the Jordan River adjacent territory following the expulsion of 40,000 people from three refugee camps. Bombardment is very likely to follow, and the targeting of individuals (think: doctors, journalists, professors) is already enabled by extensive creepy surveillance technology.
My friend Ken Jones is just returning from a trip to the occupied territory and has made public a blog I've been reading privately over the last few weeks. Hebron Witness may be found here with the explanation: "These reflections are about my Community Peacemaker Team accompaniment in Hebron Palestine, February 2025."
All the slaughter and destruction in Gaza was portrayed as being the Zionist entity's attempt to defeat Hamas. I'll remind readers that the West Bank has nothing to do with Hamas which rules Gaza but not the area from the river to sea.
Ofer Prison
Some excerpts from Ken's reporting:
She told us the story of Oct 7, 2024, the one year “memorial” of the Gazan prison break. An officer entered women’s rooms [at Ofer prison] and gave them 30 seconds to cover themselves before soldiers came in. When the soldiers came, they put zip ties on the women’s hands, blindfolded them, and took them out. They made them lie face down on the muddy ground, beat them, yelled at them, and brought police dogs out to terrorize them. While this was going on, soldiers went into their cells, took all of their clothes, and set off tear gas grenades in their cells. Then they put the women back in their cells.
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Today we did Mosque Patrol. Every Friday, CPT monitors the checkpoint at the Ibrahimi Mosque to accompany Muslims as they try to go for prayer. For an hour, we stood to the side of the caged-in entrance to the checkpoint, watching.
Normally, about 400 men, women, and children come on Fridays, but since October 7, the Israeli security forces have made it more difficult, with longer waits, so fewer people are coming. Some are staying at home to pray rather than subjecting themselves to being crammed together and possibly not even getting through to the mosque in time for prayer anyway. Others come carrying cardboard to pray outside the mosque or even outside the checkpoint, anticipating that they won’t make it through the gauntlet in time to enter the mosque.
The gauntlet is pretty daunting: standing body-to-body in a very tight space for a long time until the green light goes on and 2-3 people can jam themselves through a turnstile. Then they have to go through a metal detector and present their IDs to a guard inside a glassed-in booth who checks his or her computer, one person at a time, to see if they have any criminal record or other marks against them. Of course, having a criminal record is not uncommon, especially for men, in this occupied state. Nearly all Palestinian men have been detained or spent time in Israeli prisons.
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Immediately next to Um al Khair is a settlement of some 500 Israeli families that is doing everything it can to run the Palestinians off. Just a couple of days ago, settler teenagers herded their sheep right into someone’s home. The teens are evidently front-line vigilantes, as they roam around with sticks and pepper spray making life tense for people of the village. Not long ago they beat 5 women. The women needed to go to the hospital right away, but the settlers blocked the ambulance from getting to them for over 5 hours. Soldiers were present, but did nothing to stop the “very violent boys,” as our guide called them.
Whenever the villagers complain to the police about such attacks, the police say they have been told by the settlers that the teens are being attacked by the Palestinians. The police threaten to arrest the villagers if they keep making these calls.
We walked over to the demolished house where a couple of young men were sitting, looking sadly at the ruins. Three rooms and a water tank were all jumbled up in piles. One of the men told us his 60-year old mother, who owned the house, had been thrown to the ground when she yelled about her house being destroyed. The military commander of the nearby base had given the demolition order, with the rationale that the home was blocking the military view of the area. Bogus, of course. Home demolition is a standard practice for the Israeli regime.
Again, you can read all of Ken Jones' blog posts from the West Bank here. Warning: what he describes is very, very ugly.
