#235.5: A New Crown Corporation (Gaza)
Slaughter in the air – Protest on the wind – Someone else inside me – Someone could get skinned
Help Amjad get a phone & electricity for his town
Help Rulin's family stay alive to rebuild or emigrate
(Closing song: Jonesy, "Questions & Answers," from Keeping Up ..., 1973)
Comments (19)
I am rereading gravity’s rainbow and was listening to your old episodes so I had fallen behind. Caught up today and opened up Amjad’s link and realize I could put it over 25k. thank you for giving us some small way to feel useful
I tried to throw in something for both Amjad and Rulin, but since I’m in Europe, my bank approved the payment only for Amjad, since Germany based or something, I don’t know, but not Rulin, which it said directs the money to the US. I really want to support her too so as some kind of workaround I upgraded to the highest patreon tier temporarily, hoping some of that reaches Rulin through you Michael. Thank you for everything you do.
The money for Rulin technically does go to the USA, because Palestinians are not allowed to set up Gofundmes & such with a Palestinian back account – normal, cool, seems fine – and because Gofundme has clearly been hunting & shutting down campaigns for Gaza. So when her first GFM disappeared, she & I had to find someone willing to receive the money in the US and reroute it to Gaza
https://www.instagram.com/p/DF5crO_oHyw/?igsh=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== Gaza journalist’s post that has shots of US and Egyptian security forces at checkpoints
A dear friend of mine of nearly 35 years works for a German university. In his capacity with said university, he’d not that long ago traveled to Cairo for some manner of inter-collegiate exchange with a university there. While there, he was taken on a trip that took him past some absolutely MASSIVE housing complexes that were at that time, being built way on the outskirts of Cairo. He sent me pictures. The scale is beyond anything I can relate to. These did not look like luxury homes, or high-end condo’s, hell… they barely looked like much beyond a prison. When he asked the driver what they were, he just kind of shrugged, and mumbled something about “refugees.” This was before Oct 7th mind you, but not by much more than a year. Listening to today’s episode…. well, I’m sure I needn’t say, I think it’s pretty obvious how they’re about to get utilized
This is my fear about Egypt, especially if Shin Bet is actually going to take control of the Rafah border crossing. Maybe the very few people with the resources and opportunity to get across the Egyptian border until now have been allowed to live like human beings in Egypt, I don't know, there can't be many, but if Shin Bet runs the emigration process, the Palestinians who get across that line are destined for the prison equivalent of Kowloon Walled City, probably patrolled by the same kinds of people who put their Mossad expertise to use by stalking and threatening women who might testify against Harvey Weinstein
Robert’s post from 3 days ago https://x.com/robertskvarla/status/1886945878080151954?s=46
I think the US’s ultimate goal is to take out iran. They need to establish a footprint like troops operating checkpoints so there can be a pretext for more violence and suck us into the conflict…The literal people at the helm of this empire are old as fuck and they want to take Tehran before they die. They just did Syria and I believe that they think this is their shot… and so what if it’s unpopular, they dragged us kicking and screaming thru other wars before
I don't think the Iran part is anything new, and I don't really think the USA needs personnel in Gaza for that to happen, but I DO think you're right on the point of age – the John Boltons of this world, and got help us that there's more than one, are accustomed to a "foreign policy" circle in which the supposed existential threat of Iran and the "need" to destroy it are taken for granted. That's not really where they live anymore. It's China, Russia, China and Russia, Russia with China, all fuckin' day, with what I would guess might be an all-time low for sincerity about "the biggest threat to the American people," and the Iran mutants need to speak now or forever die of old age in a thorough and richly-deserved humiliation of everything they ever "stood for." ... Which makes the fucking bizarre spectacle of Trump "leaving orders for his successor in the event that he's assassinated by Iran" more worrisome, because #1, since when are Presidents allowed to leave posthumous orders?, and #2, who is in Trump's ear trying to convince him that he might get killed by Iran? Look at what Iran's done – or, much more to the point, has NOT done – about Qasim Soleimani, in/around/about Gaza, in/around/about Lebanon + Hezbollah (which is also to say Syria, logistics-wise) and, perhaps most insanely, about Israel murdering Ismail Haniyeh IN Iran, where he was explicitly living with Iran's protection (apparently not much of it), explicitly because he was a political exile, explicitly because of Iran's largely theoretical support of Hamas (or at least a free Gaza, I don't know which part they would emphasize). I can't say "bad" or "good" because I do not fully grasp Iran's prerogatives, or what they know and I don't, or what they ARE doing that hasn't made news yet – but perception-wise, they're looking pretty bitchmade to a lot of people right now: not only have they done nothing serious about Gaza, not only did they fail to back up Hezbollah or the Syrian government to an extent that would've changed anything, they let the head of Hamas get killed in THEIR country, with THEIR protection. Now, to be VERY clear, I am not decrying the fact that Iran has failed to kick off a global thermonuclear war, and it may be that they have made the only sane decision on each of these occasions, I don't know – but my point is that Iran, over the last half-decade generally and the last 16 months in particular, has made it very very very very clear that they are NOT trying to start the final war in human history ... and now it's being taken seriously that they would try to kill the fucking President of the United States? If that was gonna happen, they've had 10,000 good reasons to try it since 1979, and the present leadership of Iran could not possibly have made it more clear that their goals are 1) make sure there's still a country called Iran, and 2) make sure that we don't kill all life on Earth. Whatever the hell happened with the first 2 aspiring assassins – and even if they were just true weirdos, it's fuckin' bizarre how quickly THAT all died down – I would tend to believe the rumors that Trump was truly rattled, and perhaps had to think about dying seriously for the first time in his piggy life, AND if one or both of the attempts were more or less "on his side," i.e. orchestrated by people who wanted him to win, that does NOT necessarily mean Trump knew about them. If you were trying to set up a failed assassination to boost Donald Trump's poll numbers, would YOU tell him? Now a Pete Buttigieg, perhaps, a Company man, a pro's pro, he would need to know, but I have a real hard time believing that Donald Trump would've been able to choke that information back so long, to say nothing of assenting to a chance of getting his fuckin' melon burst. (That first one was a true split-second accident of luck from blowing Trump's head off on national TV. I don't think Trump wants to win THAT badly. If he'd lost, 2020 playbook, bullshit about fraud, try again in 2028 if he's not dead.) The immediate aftermath of implications and theories, by the way, has almost totally blacked out the fact that we got essentially as close as possible, without making it all the way there, to *living in a world where Donald Trump's head exploded during a rally on live TV.* Can you fuckin' IMAGINE. I don't know what would happen, I can't really even guess, except that it would've been the Lars von Trier fox saying CHAOS REIGNS, and that at least one person would've tried to kill Kamala. (Instinct tells me that Doug gets shot by accident.)
The idea of the Gazans returning home not even to find their home gone but to find the entire neighborhood gone is some Inherent Vice level shit. I always viewed that scene where the dude (can’t remember his name) visits Doc as Pynchon’s analysis of gentrification and real estate, but recently I’ve realized it’s so much fucking more.
It is unpleasant to the point of surreality to ask yourself "If everything in the place where I live, every building, every lifeform, every structure of any kind, was not just flattened but mangled and mutilated and allowed to burn for days, would I know where my own 'home' was? Would I recognize 'my street'?" And it is even more unpleasant to consider the human corollary here, i.e. all the murdered people who have not been counted yet because nobody can tell who they are anymore. They might be people you knew well, saw all the time, were related to, and now not a single goddamn living soul can look at them and say "Yes, I know who that is."
There’s been photos of mercenaries at checkpoints in Gaza floating around for a few days or maybe a week now
https://x.com/clashreport/status/1885420142818976245?s=46&t=V2YKsaAIc7rEAL0IUFRIgg
at the risk of stating the obvious or asking a stupid question, or somewhere in between, wasn't marching orders for direct US military involvement in Gaza what got everyone to know Aaron Bushnell's name? wasn't that act taken in direct response to a deployment order? even if explicit admissions have been kept largely to entirely hidden, I've taken for granted that US boots have been on the ground since at least that time, if not earlier, where more "clandestine" soldiers and orders are concerned.
With Bushnell, I can't remember if it was a response to one specific thing, but "mobilization" and actually having US military personnel operate military checkpoints where Palestinians are getting black-bagged and tortured on a completely arbitrary basis are 2 very different things. We've moved around aircraft carriers and shit, we've probably direct some troop movement from CENTCOM and maybe even AFRICOM, but I have never heard anything about US regular military on the ground in Gaza, much less being part of a new joint occupation force since the ceasefire. I'm sure there are intelligence people hanging around, they were there already, but I have never heard ANY announcement that a coalition of Israel, Egypt, and the USA consider Gaza theirs to "administer" at the point of a gun
that ~500,000 calculation inferring from Trump's comment has been done elsewhere, but I can't remember where. I realize that's not very helpful. maybe chapo, maybe true anon, maybe neither. someone else surely knows.
Emma Vigeland on the Majority Report has been saying it all week
It's Jih-BAH-lee-ya. my pedantic apologies.
I think you’re doing great without a prepared script. I think you carried a lot more weight. I felt it, and it felt good to have someone to share it with. Thanks for your coverage of Palestine , Mr. Judge, and the way you commit your whole heart to the Palestinian people. Edit: Alhamdulillah for Rulin’s voice.