They’re Repeating The Word ‘Unprovoked’ Again, This Time In Defense Of Israel

We’re seeing the western political/media class bleating the word “unprovoked” in unison again, this time in reference to the massive multi-pronged operation launched by Hamas against Israel on Saturday morning which reportedly killed hundreds of Israelis.

“The United States unequivocally condemns the unprovoked attacks by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians,” reads a statement from the White House.

“The loss of life in Israel as a result of the violent, calculated and unprovoked attack by Hamas is heartbreaking,” reads a statement by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

“The unprovoked terror attack today and the murders of innocent Israeli citizens are a stark reminder of the brutality of Hamas and Iran-backed extremists,” reads a statement by congressman and house speaker contender Jim Jordan.

“This ignominious, unprovoked, and barbaric attack on Israel must be met with world condemnation and unequivocal support for the Jewish state’s right to self-defense,” tweeted presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr.

“This is an ‘unprovoked attack on civilians’: Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg,” reads a recent Fox News report.

“Unprovoked aggression by Hamas terrorists,” reads a tweet by former secretary of state Mike Pompeo.

“I forcefully condemn these cowardly, horrifying, unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas,” tweeted congressman John Fetterman.

“These attacks by Hamas against Israel were heinous and unprovoked,” tweeted Senator Mark Kelly.

“As a steadfast supporter and ally of Israel, I unequivocally condemn the unprovoked and unprecedented terrorist attack launched by Hamas and stand with the people of Israel as it rightly defends itself,” tweeted congressman Richie Torres.

“The unprovoked attacks on Israel by Hamas through Gaza and via air and sea, are absolutely a terrorist attack,” tweeted Democratic Party pundit Ed Krassenstein.

“I unequivocally condemn Hamas’ horrific, unprovoked attacks and call on all parties to take steps to prevent civilian harm,” tweeted congresswoman Sara Jacobs.

I could cite many, many more examples, but I think that’s enough to make the point I’m trying to make. Isn’t it strange seeing the same oddly specific word choice inserted over and over and over again about the same event in statements by politicians and pundits, regardless of their political affiliation? When you lay them all out together it starts to sound highly suspicious, like someone always referring to his car as “my car, which I did not steal,” or always introducing his spouse as “my wife, whom I do not beat.”

It’s clear by now that whenever you see the word “unprovoked” being forcefully repeated in a uniform way across the entire political/media class, whatever they’re talking about was definitely massively provoked.

We saw this exact same thing when Russia invaded Ukraine; from the very beginning western politics and media were saturated with the word “unprovoked”, bashing the western public in the face with that message over and over and over again despite the obvious and undeniable fact that the war in Ukraine was most definitely provoked.

As Noam Chomsky quipped last year, “Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise, they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

And the same is of course true of the latest Hamas offensive. There are all kinds of arguments you could legitimately make about it, but one argument you definitely cannot defend is that it was unprovoked. As Palestinian-American writer and comedian Amer Zahr put it on Twitter, “75 years of ethnic cleansing. 15 years of blockade. Confiscation of Palestinian lands. Pogroms on Palestinian towns. Desecration of Palestinian sacred sites. Daily raids into Palestinian homes. Constant humiliation of a entire people. Nothing about today is ‘unprovoked.’”

Calling Palestinian violence against Israel “unprovoked” is easily even more ridiculous than calling the Russian invasion unprovoked, because the abuses of Israeli apartheid are so well-known by the general public at this point. Multiple mainstream human rights organizations have accused Israel of administering an abusive apartheid regime which treats Palestinians as lesser people. Palestinians who live in the open-air prison known as Gaza are deliberately subjected to undrinkable water, food shortages, energy shortages and bombing campaigns. Those outside Gaza are subjected to racist, violent policing and land seizure and live under a different set of laws than Jewish Israelis. The entire people were forced out of their homes to make way for a new state for reasons that had nothing to do with them, and any attempt to resist this has seen them killed as “terrorists”.

Of course the attack was provoked.

Isn’t it odd that the western political/media class would begin uniformly asserting something so easily disprovable? So transparently false? Why would they keep choosing over and over and over again in each instance to make use of that specific word “unprovoked” in their condemnations of the attacks by Hamas?

The answer is that this choice is not so much something they are saying as something they are doing. They’re not attempting to communicate with their audiences, they’re attempting to circumvent the critical thinking of their audience and trick them into accepting a blatant falsehood as true.

Skillful manipulators make frequent use of a cognitive bias known as the illusory truth effect, a glitch in the way human minds tend to operate which makes it hard for us to differentiate between the experience of hearing a well-evidenced fact and the experience of hearing something that they’ve heard repeated multiple times. If you want the public to believe something false you won’t be able to use facts and evidence to make your case to them, so what you can do is just repeat something over and over again until it starts sounding like the truth. Repeat the lie enough times and boom, you’ve perception-managed westerners into viewing the world from an understanding that Israel did nothing to provoke Palestinians into their actions.

After the news broke about the Hamas offensive I tweeted, “Here come days and days of western news media slyly reversing the aggressor-defender relationship and reporting as though the violence began with the Hamas offensive, spontaneously out of nowhere.”

There’s no “collateral damage” in Gaza. Collateral damage is when you unintentionally kill civilians. You can’t drop military explosives on places you know are densely packed with children and then call their deaths unintentional.

"You can’t drop military explosives on places you know are densely packed with children and then call their deaths unintentional."

Who was behind the Gaza hospital blast – visual investigation

If Israel didn’t bomb that hospital, then why is it publishing fake audio clips of people posing as Hamas fighters agreeing with each other that Israel definitely didn’t bomb that hospital?

btw... israelienii sunt la al 19-lea spital bombardat în Gaza în decurs de 10 zile...

The US-centralized empire is a giant network of allies, partners and assets spanning the entire globe. Many of the nations in this network, such as Israel, have strong ideologies and values systems that the empire must cooperate with to obtain their loyalty. But the empire itself has no ideology or values — it values nothing but planetary domination. The empire's motives are no more ideological than the motives of a mugger are ideological.

So the empire has no ideology, but it is held together by cooperation with individual governments who do. The problem this creates is that sometimes the ideologies of those states cause them to do things that go against the interests of the empire as a whole. Israel can just up and decide to commit a genocidal massacre in front of everyone. Saudi Arabia can decide it's going to dismember a Washington Post reporter with a bone saw. Proxies in Ukraine can keep saying Nazi things and sporting Nazi insignia in public. They do these things because unlike the top brass in the imperial power structure they are guided by ideology, with no regard for the need to preserve the empire's image as a "rules-based international order".

This often creates a PR crisis for the empire, because the public will cease consenting to the network of alliances, partners and assets if it becomes sufficiently aware of the depravity needed to hold it all together. This is typically easy to resolve because the US empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine in the history of civilization, but that propaganda machine is operated by individuals — individuals who may have learned about Palestinian rights at university, or who were disgusted about the way their employer ran cover for Israel's murder of Shireen Abu Akleh only to find out Israel did it and was lying. So they don't always play along with the imperial machine in their reporting, thereby exacerbating the empire's PR crisis.

The worst thing that could possibly happen, from the empire's point of view, is for the public to start opening their eyes to its criminality. With Israel on a genocidal rampage as pro-Palestinian protesters flood the streets worldwide, we may be certain that the manipulators who are responsible for imperial perception management are in full crisis mode, because if a critical mass of people can pick apart this one lie, it opens up the possibility of their unplugging themselves from the whole propaganda matrix that keeps the empire operational.

The empire managers are standing by Israel's side and doing everything they can to pretend its actions are right and just, but they are fidgeting uncomfortably, and behind the scenes we may be sure they're in total damage control. That's why we're being slammed with such a mad deluge of propaganda right now, and that's why they're doing everything they can to censor and suppress and shut down voices who are critical of Israel's actions in Gaza.

An Israeli woman named Yasmin Porat confirmed in an interview with Israel Radio that the military “undoubtedly” killed numerous Israeli noncombatants during gun battles with Hamas militants on October 7. “They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” she stated, referring to Israeli special forces.

In an October 20 interview, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who, at the request of Ukraine, played a central role in the Istanbul talks, added his testimony that, in the end, “the Ukrainians did not agree to peace because they were not allowed to. They first had to ask the Americans about everything they discussed.”

The world did not take note of Schröder’s revelation or of its significance: that Ukraine and Russia agreed to peace and the US said no. Nor did the world take note that Russia did. In his speech to High-Level International Conference Eurasian Security, Lavrov made clear that Moscow had noted the significance of Schröder’s statement.

In America they killed all the buffalo just to take away food from the natives,
made mountains of their skulls and posed proudly in photos
like they posed proudly in front of burnt bodies after lynchings in the south.

In Australia they stole the brown children and gave them to pale families
and watched their ancient civilization disappear into the toxic fumes of industry
like a sailboat into the mist.

In Israel teenagers play with buttons that cause explosions on screens
and look forward to the end of the Gaza operation
so they can leave and go play better video games.

In Gaza mothers clutch tattered pieces of flesh and clothing to their chests
and scream names that will never again be answered
and call out questions to the heavens that will also go unanswered.

And the ghosts of the buffalo roam through the ruins
looking for their heads
while the people of Gaza comb through the rubble
looking for their dead,
and the rest of us stare at screens and cry like babies
and ask our own unanswered questions
of heavens clouded by the fumes of industry,
vanishing stars above a dying world
as the lights go out in Gaza
one by one.

3. That Hamas is using “human shields” — meaning Hamas bases are hidden amidst civilian populations — yet Israel is managing to kill thousands of civilians without doing any meaningful damage to Hamas.

Most people tend to believe that the CIA is just an intelligence service, gathering information to enable better public policy.
A person in a suit Description automatically generated with low confidence
[Source: wikipedia.org]

However, CAM readers know that its real purpose is to engage in political skullduggery and subvert or destabilize other countries in order to help facilitate the goal of U.S. global domination.

These articles covered U.S. and CIA subversion of Serbian politics in the aftermath of the 1990s U.S.-NATO military intervention and their efforts to destroy the last vestiges of socialism and independence. Successive U.S. administration-supported pro-Western politicians who would effectively give up Serbia’s sovereignty.

There is suspicion of CIA involvement in the assassination of Zoran Djindjić after he refused to hand over materials to the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia which would challenge the narrative that the U.S. was trying to advance through these tribunals.

The interview below details the CIA’s alliance with the criminal Zemunski Clan, which has helped to advance U.S. political interests in Serbia and carried out the Djindjić assassination.

These are the kind of allies the CIA has a long record of cultivating—going back to the post-World War II era when the CIA allied with the founder of the Japanese Yakuza, Yoshio Kodama, to help stamp out Communism in Japan, and facilitated the drug traffic in Laos and Thailand during the Indochina Wars in alliance with criminal gangsters.

During the 1990s Kosovo War, the CIA armed and empowered the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a leading drug-trafficking organization run by the Albanian mafia, to fight the Serbs. So the pattern we see today, unfortunately, is nothing new.

The single most powerful force in the world is Islam. It crosses national, ethnic, tribal, historical, linguistic, socio-economic and all other boundaries. This is precisely why for hundreds of years the west has laboured to keep the Muslim world divided and paid off. They are terrified of Islam because united, they would not be able to exploit a single Muslim or harm a hair on a single Muslim's head. But the atrocities they're now cosigning in Palestine are uniting the entire Muslim world. What a catastrophic miscalculation from the west, what a turn of events.

Anyone who criticizes US-sponsored military violence gets accused of supporting the other side by supporters of that military violence. If you opposed the Iraq invasion you were a Saddam supporter, if you criticized US proxy warfare in Ukraine you were a Putin lover, etc. The argument is that criticizing the actions of the world's most powerful war machine means you support the side opposing that war machine, and because you're a treasonous monster who supports the other side that means your criticisms should not be listened to.

This happens with literally every single high-profile act of US interventionism. Literally every single one, without a single, solitary exception. What this means in effect is that all criticism of the world's most powerful war machine gets stomped down. Those who are calling you a Hamas lover and a terrorist sympathizer today are telling you that NOBODY should EVER criticize ANY US-sponsored act of military aggression, because they're using the exact same tactic that is literally always used to stomp out ALL US-sponsored acts of military aggression.

What they are really saying when they call you a Hamas supporter is, "Shut up. Be silent. Never criticize US warmongering. Never criticize the most consequential actions of the most powerful and destructive government on this planet, under any circumstances. Shut up. Be silent. Obey."

"When we sent an ambulance to bring the patients—a few meters away—and they attacked the ambulance... There’s also a sniper who attacked patients, they have gunshot wounds."

Israel getting mad at Hamas for killing Israelis is like a man getting mad at his shadow for darkening his floor. It's maddening to see grown adults acting like Hamas are these foreign invaders who attacked Israelis out of the blue out of a hatred for Jewish people, like they're internet-radicalized neo-Nazis from eastern Europe or something.

Hamas attacked Israel because Israel is a murderous and tyrannical apartheid regime who butchers children and makes lives miserable for the Palestinian people. The violence on October 7 was the echo of the violence Israel has been inflicting on Palestinians for generations. Only a fool gets angry at his echo for talking back to him.

Although corporate news media have made it clear they don’t buy the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claim that al-Shifa Hospital has been a cover for a Hamas command and control center and weapons armory, Western media have failed to report a much bigger story.

The IDF and the Israeli government already knew when they launched their propaganda campaign about al-Shifa that Hamas had no military command and control facility hidden there because it had already found the complex kilometers away.

The Hagari presentation came before the discovery of the actual Hamas high-command bunker underneath the above-ground Hamas high-command office in Beit Lahiya. The IDF has now eliminated the entire video of that long, detailed and illustrated presentation by Hagari from its website, because it would become a major embarrassment to the IDF once the full truth is known.

In recent days, the IDF has fixed the world’s attention on a tunnel, the opening of which was discovered very close to the outer fence of al-Shifa Hospital grounds. The tunnel was found by the IDF to be 10m deep, compared with the 30m deep abandoned high command tunnel.

On Nov. 21, the IDF announced it had breached the heavy blast door of the tunnel, meaning that it could now determine what lay on the other side, if anything. But given that the IDF has already discovered the real Hamas command bunker elsewhere — and the absence of evidence of a connection from hospital buildings to a tunnel — the IDF is unlikely to find such a connection from the tunnel to the hospital.

If you're just tuning in, Israeli intelligence ignored mountains of information that the October 7 attack was coming and left Israelis completely undefended, then the IDF killed significant numbers of Israelis with indiscriminate fire and pinned the blame for 100% of Israeli deaths on Hamas, and all those deaths are now being used as justification to push Gazans off their land to the south and shoot them if they try to return while Israeli officials keep talking about how great it would be to get all Palestinians out of all of Gaza.

Israel isn't bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Hamas, Israel is bombing Gaza with the intention of wiping out Gaza.

This isn't a war against Hamas, it's a military operation to facilitate an ethnic cleansing. Hamas aren't the targets, they're the excuse.

Regarding antisemitism — the Arabs are also semites.
Israel has usurpated even this notion.

In the Russo-Ukrainian war, US propaganda has exploited a time tested syllogistic sophistry. First you identify the nation at war with the individual who leads the nation. It is not Russia’s war on Ukraine, it is Putin’s war on Ukraine. Then you identify the individual with Hitler. At various times, Hilary Clinton, John McCain, Lindasy Graham, Marco Rubio and Zbigniew Brzezinski have all compared Putin to Hitler, as have James Clapper, Kevin McCarthy, Polish President Andrzej Duda, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and others. What powerfully follows psychologically, is that, since the war is a war against “a second Hitler,” any method used to stop him is morally and militarily justified.

A corollary of the Hitler strategy is the madman strategy. By labeling a leader a madman, you render him incapable of reason or, therefore, of negotiation in the public imagination. If he can’t be negotiated with, he can only be defeated on the battlefield. Like the Hitler strategy, the madman strategy is not new. Leading up to the 1953 coup in Iran, while officials privately compared Mohammad Mossadeq to Gandhi, they publicly painted him as unstable, irrational, hysterical and crazy. Putin has been painted as an irrational actor who cannot be reasoned with, trusted or negotiated with.

Pentagon contractor Elon Musk and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu had a conversation that they broadcast on Twitter during Musk’s apology pilgrimage to Israel in a desperate bid to salvage his public image amid costly accusations of antisemitism.

The “conversation” was really more of a monologue, with the Israeli leader droning on in his conspicuously American accent while Musk meekly agreed with him on every point. During his lecture, Bibi said something worth highlighting while complaining about the worldwide pro-Palestine protests that have been underway since the beginning of Israel’s ongoing Gaza massacre.