Menticide As Gaza Atrocities Are Ignored

Jabalia concentration camp, October 21, 2024

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who had just finished teaching writing to a class of elders.  A student asked how she was doing and my friend replied, I am distraught about Gaza. Student: Why? What's going on in Gaza? 

Today I encountered a new word, "menticide," defined as "a systematic and intentional undermining of a person's conscious mind; synonym: brainwashing."

Yesterday Gazan journalist Motasem Dalloul posted on Twitter:

A mother from #Jabalia says: “They took all the children from their mothers and put them inside what resembled a pit or a hole. The tank came to circle around them repeatedly until their bones cracked under the pressure of dust and sand, amidst the screams of children and the wailing of mothers. “After that, the soldiers came and started throwing the children towards the mothers, and whoever caught a child was ordered to carry him and move away quickly, with no guarantee that the child would be their own. “Many mothers carried children who were not their own, and were forced to leave with them, leaving their own children in the hands of other mothers. This marked the beginning of a new chapter of suffering, with mothers searching for their children in the arms of other women, trying to calm the children they held until they found their real mothers.“

I have no words adequate to describe how I felt when I learned what new horrors my tax dollars are funding in Gaza. 

Also yesterday, the sadists in charge of the Zionist entity Israel accused six of the few journalists still alive and able to report from Gaza as "terrorists." 

Here's Dalloul's post about that:

Day before yesterday, U.S. imperial media outlet CNN committed what turned out to be a blunder when they published a sympathetic piece on the late Eliran Mizrahi, an Israeli occupier who committed suicide after being deployed in Gaza. 

A blunder because here is what Guy Zaken, who drove a bulldozer with Mizrahi, had to say about his genocide-induced trauma:

Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”

“Everything squirts out,” he added.

Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.

“When you see a lot of meat outside, and blood… both ours and theirs (Hamas), then it really affects you when you eat,” he told CNN, referring to bodies as “meat.”

I think the phrase "had to" belongs in air quotes, don't you?

Nobody "has to" treat other human beings like this. 

Forced march of Palestinians being expelled from northern Gaza October 2024

Or this (trigger warning: video from September of an Israeli bulldozer running over a child).

Why don't Palestinians just give up and allow Israel to sell off Gaza's gas and oil rights and create settler colonies on top of the blood-stained rubble? An explanatory excerpt from the last will of Yayha Sinwar, who my friend's student has probably never heard of here in the menticide bubble of the U.S. 

"They fear your steadfastness more than they fear your weapons."

Show your steadfastness by standing with us at the General Dynamics bomb factory that makes these:

Take a stand in your community. That is, if menticide hasn't gotten to you yet.

Hasbara Not Working? Crack Down On Free Speech

Yahya Sinwar amid the rubble of Gaza, where he was born a refugee in his own land.

In the West we grew up awash in hasbara i.e. Zionist narrative spin both overt and, at times, surprisingly subtle. 

I can remember my father telling me that Israel had no oil reserves and stood alone in the region in this regard. At the time I'm sure he believed that was true. It was part of the David and Goliath myth-making where the Zionist entity was the weak and small character and the Arabs were the giants. Except when they were invisible -- as in the nonsense saying, "a land without a people for a people without a land."

Decades later I would teach high school students about the rise of fascism, the Holocaust, and the creation of the state of Israel -- followed by the Nakba, still unfolding. It was challenging to convey the jaunty tone of U.S. media coverage from the mid 1960's. For example, the Six-Day War, which a news anchor gleefully termed a "blintz-krieg." Because turning Nazi atrocities into cute references to Jewish cuisine helped conceal the fact that Palestinians were suffering for the sins of European fascists.

How times have changed.

Israel is now the butt of jokes about how universally they're hated, and their attempts at spin are tremendously out of touch. Witness their attempt to denigrate Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar by publishing their drone footage of his heroic last stand, footage which contradicted their own propaganda that Sinwar was allegedly hiding in the tunnels, disguised in a burqa, amid hostages being used as human shields. 

Today, people who barely knew his name have seen him display almost superhuman courage and resilience by continuing to resist with only one remaining hand. The effect on public opinion has been the opposite of what was intended: to depict Sinwar as weak and defeated.  Headlines like "IDF Finally Kills Yahya Sinwar After 41,800 Failed Attempts" and photo pairings like this one are all over social media: 

What's a failing imperial outpost to do? Crack down on free speech, of course.

Yesterday in the UK, Electronic Intifada editor Asa Winstanley had his home raided and his electronic devices confiscated.

Here in the belly of the beast, a friend reports their Instagram account is suspended after trying to post writings by and about Sinwar. 

Twitter just announced that blocking will no longer protect your account from unwelcome eyeballs. 

And Australia's government has announce it will levy fines of up to 5% of global revenue on social media platforms that fail to stop the spread of "misinformation." Misinformation meaning true facts that threaten the imperial narrative.

We were told for months that Israel's massacres were about the hostages. But that was never the case, as we found out when we learned that Israel murdered them, too.

From Palestine Will Be Free on substack yesterday:

The world has come to see why that deplorable, despicable, inhuman entity cannot continue to exist and why it must be dismantled in favour of a Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in which all faiths can live peacefully side by side, just like they did before the beginning of Zionist thievery and terrorism over a century ago. 

Sinwar, more than anyone else in recent history, has brought that day closer to fruition.