It’s a symptom of Western civilization’s sickness that prominent people are only now expressing qualms about the prolonged and monstrous abuses Israel has been committing in plain sight.
The death of 17-year-old Palestinian Mohammed Assaf, from northern Gaza, as a result of the famine and humanitarian crisis in the Strip, July 2024. (Hossam Shabat/Wikimedia Commons/ CC BY-SA 4.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
Israel’s top human rights group B’Tselem has finally declared that Israel is committing genocide, as has the Israel-based Physicians for Human Rights.
The Israeli organizations join Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, U.N. human rights experts, and the overwhelming majority of leading authorities on the subject of genocide in their conclusion.
The debate is over. The Israel apologists lost. And we are seeing this reflected in mainstream discourse.
Pop megastar Ariana Grande has started speaking out in support of Gaza, telling her social media followers that “starving people to death is a red line.” This is a new threshold. Opposing Israel’s genocide is now the most mainstream as it has ever been.
Ariana Grande shares support for Gaza, amplifying Red Line for Gaza campaign on her IG story. #CeasefireNow #FreePalestine pic.twitter.com/KMcXz7EAnP
— loveari (@harajukiana) July 27, 2025
MSNBC just ran a piece explicitly titled “Israel is starving Gaza. And the U.S. is complicit.,” featuring a segment with the virulently pro-Israel Morning Joe slamming the mass atrocity.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, himself a former AIPAC employee, has done a 180 and is now raking Israel over the coals on the air for its deliberately engineered starvation campaign.
The New York Times finally overcame its phobia of the g-word with an op-ed titled “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”
Everything was fine when they were sniping hundreds of kids in the head, burning down refugee camps, and raping prisoners in torture camps
But now, Israel’s war has become unjust pic.twitter.com/uD2b7peLzy
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 29, 2025
We’re now seeing notoriously Zionist swamp monsters in the Democratic Party like Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar changing their tune and attacking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump for their joint genocide project in Gaza, with increasingly forceful pushback from some on the right like Marjorie Taylor Greene (who on Tuesday became the first Republican member of Congress to call it genocide.)
As Western pundits, politicians and celebrities suddenly pivot to denouncing Israel’s genocidal atrocities after two years of silence, it’s hard to believe that just a few weeks ago we were being told that saying “death to the IDF” is a hate crime.
People who’ve been staring at this genocide from the beginning have been asking the entire time, what is it going to take? What will it take for our society to stop sleepwalking through inane trivialities and vapid distractions and start opposing the holocaust of our day?
Raining military explosives on a giant concentration camp packed full of children wasn’t enough.
Burning children alive wasn’t enough.
Systematically destroying Gaza’s entire healthcare infrastructure?—?up to and including entering hospitals they’ve attacked and destroying individual pieces of medical equipment one by one?—?wasn’t enough.
Killing more journalists than were killed in both World Wars plus the U.S. Civil War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Yugoslav Wars, the War in Afghanistan, and the ongoing war in Ukraine wasn’t enough.
The systemic rape and torture of prisoners wasn’t enough.
After months of silence, Obama has been shamed into finally saying something about Israel’s Auschwitizing of Gaza
His statement was truly Obama-esque, in that it was milquetoast and delivered with cold, calculated detachment https://t.co/jAVBHC5ffr
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) July 27, 2025
IDF soldiers routinely sharing photos and videos of themselves mockingly dressing in the clothes of dead and displaced Palestinian women and playing with the toys of dead and displaced Palestinian children wasn’t enough.
Israeli officials openly expressing genocidal intent for the people of Gaza wasn’t enough.
The U.S. president and Israeli prime minister openly declaring their goal of the complete ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian territory wasn’t enough.
Field testing new weapons of war on Palestinians like they’re guinea pigs in a laboratory wasn’t enough.
Leaving countless civilians to slowly suffocate or die of dehydration trapped under the rubble of bombed buildings wasn’t enough.
Creating an AI system to ensure that suspected Hamas fighters are bombed when they’re at home with their children and naming it “Where’s Daddy?” wasn’t enough.
Using Palestinians as human shields wasn’t enough.
Burying injured civilians alive with bulldozers wasn’t enough.
When you see extremely Zionist CNN is literally cooking Israel so hard for straight 4 minutes you know that the situtation is far worse than what you know pic.twitter.com/JzhGuC0HTB
— Furkan Gözükara (@GozukaraFurkan) July 26, 2025
The IDF admitting to running a popular Telegram channel called “72 Virgins” which posted extremely gory and sadistic snuff films of people in Gaza being butchered by Israeli forces wasn’t enough.
IDF snipers routinely shooting children in the head and chest throughout the Gaza Strip wasn’t enough.
The IDF flying drones which play the sounds of crying babies at night in order to lure out hiding civilians to murder them wasn’t enough.
IDF troops telling the Israeli press that they’re being ordered to massacre starving civilians seeking food from aid sites wasn’t enough.
Israeli snipers targeting different body parts of starving civilians on designated days — leg day, head day, genitals day, etc. — wasn’t enough.
Far right Israeli citizens setting up blockades to stop aid trucks from entering Gaza while they enjoyed parties and barbecues at the blockade sites wasn’t enough.
Headlines in US media are finally getting honest. pic.twitter.com/yIXjJL1m9y
— Linda Mamoun (@mamoun_linda) July 26, 2025
Using lies and propaganda to dismantle the aid system for bringing essential food and life-supporting supplies into Gaza, to replace it with a U.S./Israeli opwhere aid seekers are massacred every single day, wasn’t enough.
Using siege warfare to deliberately starve Gaza for the previous 22 months wasn’t enough.
But now that starvation has hit a critical point and deaths from malnutrition are skyrocketing, now that images of dead skeletal children are filling our screens, now that the damage to organs and brains from starvation will be irreversible in many cases — now it’s enough.
That was the line, apparently. That’s what mainstream Western consciousness has decided is too much. Everything up until that line was fine, but now it’s not fine anymore.
And the killing is still going on. The sudden awakening of conscience hasn’t translated into any material actions or changes at all yet.
If it had come in October or November 2023 like it should have we might be seeing that opposition translate into actually saving Gaza by now, but the light has only just been switched on. It’s not even guaranteed that those who are speaking up will continue to do so.
Hello I am a North American journalist and op Ed writer. For the last 18 months my dang computer has been auto correcting all of my writing and posts to say that what’s happening in Gaza is complicated but necessary. What I actually meant is that it’s bad. Thank you
— Boeckner (@d_boeckner) July 26, 2025
I’m glad people are waking up to the cruel reality of this nightmare. I’m grateful to each and every influential voice who uses their platform to speak out, even at this late date. I truly am.
But I also think we need to take a very hard, very uncomfortable look at ourselves as a society right now. If all those monstrous abuses were tolerable for us over these last two years, there’s something deeply and profoundly sick about our civilization.
We are not living right. We are not thinking right. We are not feeling right. We are warped and twisted. The information we consume and the norms we’ve been conditioned to accept have corrupted our souls.
We have been made into something bad. Something ugly. Something shameful. Something we need to do everything in our power to change.
We need to rescue ourselves from what we have become. We need to transform, deeply and radically, into something that could never again allow something like this to occur.
The way things are clearly isn’t working. The mainstream worldview is clearly a lie. Everything we’ve been taught to believe about our society, our nation, our government and our world was clearly false.
We need to fight our way through the cognitive dissonance of recognizing that our entire way of looking at things as a collective has failed, and we need to find a new way of being.
Otherwise we’re going to keep being smashed in the face with increasingly horrifying reminders of what we have allowed ourselves to become.
The lessons will repeat until they are learned.
We had better start learning them.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter,Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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Why do I think this corporate media coverage is political posturing? Ambitious sociopaths aren’t known for suddenly developing empathy. Rivals jockeying for power in Parliament by attacking those who were conducting the endless unpopular war in America is largely how this country got its independence, after all. Ben Franklin himself created a classic newspaper hoax, a false atrocity story of King George gleefully displaying American scalps supposedly taken by Britain’s Indian allies, as a way of discrediting the war effort. But this time the real atrocities eclipse all products of the imagination.
Sleepy Australia has agreed to order its people to sit quietly and not rock the boat. It’s total political censorship. The bourgeoisie heavyweights, notably actors and media personalities, have come together and produced a video calling for “an end to hate.” All of the approved social movers and shakers, Left and Right, have come together in a priestly role providing moral sermons against unspecified “hate.” What they really mean is don’t hate Israel and don’t denounce the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people. Typical of media heavyweights they take their decades of sitting before cameras as evidence that they know what they are talking about. They’re a bunch of Karens, ignorant of history and facts, spouting political garbage. And that’s the level of political awareness in this ridiculously immature and cowardly country.
This Gaza genocide is simply a continuation of the ongoing wars that the US government has waged from its inception against the Indians, the Filipinos, the Koreans, the Vietnamese, and any other people who have stood against its imperial designs. The Zionists of today are simply a tool of that government, founded by Masons, dedicated to the principal of unleashing war on civilians.
In other words they are a dangerous bunch of crazy fuckers!
I agree!
“But now that starvation has hit a critical point …….. – now it’s enough.”
Most politicians could not care less about starving people – of far greater concern is how it might refelect on themselves and how it could affect their electability. Compare it to a criminal crying when caught, not out of concern for their victims, but because of getting caught.
As Joe Lauria said 2 days ago re: Zionist genocide in Gaza “Losing on the PR Front.” The western journalism style is an inverted pyramid with a clickbait or misleading headline and supporting details (if any) at the bottom. As of yesterday and today, MSM reports of mass starvation in Gaza means the top down carefully managed authoritarian pyramid is wavering, its platform no longer stable. Too much evidence for us spoon fed masses to swallow any more without gagging.
No, one horror after another wasn’t enough until the sheer weight hit the tipping point. The MSM obscures the truth and we humans are good at not seeing what we don’t want to see. Every genocide is denied until only the most zealous political, economic, ethnic, or religious fundamentalists still claim it didn’t happen.
It’s all over bar the shouting… Weve failed tragically as a species… I’m just hangin’ around, with my head between my knees, waiting for the fucking Comet…
I’ve just read a comment on a youtube song. It said “the perfect song to sit on the roof and watch the apocalypse come.
The song is “thankyou for the music” by ABBA.
Some gutless leaders are speaking out against Israel atrocities,18 to 20 months to late.Prefer to hang on to the coattails of USA for past 2 years.
You could write a comparable piece about America, where all the atrocities aren’t enough. At last, people are mad as hell, looking for what to do. See my Substack for my two cents about getting ourselves organized:
The massive change of understanding we need; Looking for where it can come from.
The Israeli Jewish supremacists have so overreached, so overplayed their hand that certain self-serving pro-Israel players in the West now realize that they simply have no choice but to issue some tepid criticisms of this sadistic Zio conduct.
The reality is so extraordinary — deliberate starvation, shooting to death civilians standing in line for aid — that most reasonable Western officials understand they must make some sort of statement, regardless of how ineffective. Some of them also are probably afraid that real actual justice might (might) peek through within the next few years and that they could possibly be imprisoned as co-conspirators with the paranoid sadistic Israeli Jew supremacists. They’re attempting to cover some bases.
Though funding will continue, of course.
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
Omer El Akkad nailed it in that statement and in his sad and poetic book of the same name. And let us be honest, those suddenly speaking up now prove his point. Here they are now standing in the blood and wreckage of genocide, trying to position themselves at the forefront of “speaking out”. Never forget their complicity!
Some lawyers are challenging their complicity in France:
Xxxx://www.middleeasteye.net/news/over-100-french-lawyers-call-icc-investigate-france-complicity-genocide-gaza
Hopefully this will snowball to include the rest of european enablers.
After WW2, many of the German people claimed to be the “good Germans” who did not support Hitler and who had no idea what was going on at the camp down the road with all the skinny people at the weight-loss camp with the crematoriums which burned 24 hours a day.
Now, we get to meet the modern “Good Celebrities”, who also did not support what was going on and swear they had no idea about any of this for the last 2 years or 10 years or 20 years.
Genocide, you are either for it or agin it, and silence is the same as being for it, so two years of silence followed by a press release does not get a reward.
Wanna bet? I’ll wager the scum who’ve been backing the genocide up to now and have supposedly only just realised will still end up rewarded very handsomely as usual. It’s one of the few things our glorious leaders can always be relied on to get done.
Some citings of atrocities i hadn’t heard of either in that list. That telegram channel for instance.
And it will never be enough for the capitalist parasites who revere wealth and the wealthy and the filth money enables.
Thankyou Ms. Johnstone.
Call me jaded but I have a haunting suspicion the majority of these people are only now speaking out because they believe Israel has all but completed their objective of wiping out the native Semites of Palestine to the point there’s little anyone can now do short of immediate military intervention (and we all see that not happening fast) to stop the Israeli’s taking over the strip of blood-soaked rubble they’ve made out of a great and ancient land.
Too little and far, far too late, this all just feels like damage control by otherwise unconscionable people desperate to be seen to be against the inevitable outcome of Israel’s openly genocidal actions. Their actions of sitting and watching until it’s all but over, speak louder than anything they can now say.
May I be very wrong in my assessment and simply blinded by bitterness.
Platopus, I think you’re exactly right. Those who are just now objecting waited until the damage was essentially complete before speaking out.
Israel couldn’t have done this on its own. The enablers and supporters in the west are the true criminals.
Yes, people are waking up
Our ruling parasitic class not so much
Their apparent change of heart, if they even have such an organ, is naturally due entirely to self interest
There are two major conflicts playing out currently and both are siphoning reserve military supplies from deep storage
These cannot be replaced by industrial production any time soon enough
Ergo, one conflict must be wound back so the other can potentially prevail
(Un)Fortunately it’s well past midnight on that bender and most likely both conflicts will just dry up, parched as in a desert of PR
No happy ending possible
But we hosts ought to shake our suckers off while we still can
Ivermectin?
It pretty clear AIPAC needs to register as a (FARA) foreign agent or fing agent for short.
Or proscribed like al-Qaeda.
Oh, wait, they’re OK now in the USA …
and the Nakba of 1948 wasn’t enough
She laid it out .
Some of the citings I have not heatd of .
This opens the door to the cellar !
—–
Short quote from newa article , re 72 or telegram ?
“Apparently, people in his chain of command lied to him about the channel and its connection to Israel’s Influencing Department. “In the wake of these findings, the unit’s wartime commander is to end his military service,” Haaretz reported.”
The plausable deniabilty handbook .
And everyone else are liars ?
Was there disposition of them ?
The plot thickens , lots of unaswered questions to this abyss .
Tnx Caitlin