 At this point, we have to always assume Israel is lying until proven otherwise. Notes from the edge of the narrative matrix. Israel is killing journalists at a historic rate, is killing an unprecedented number of journalists, and is starving half a million civilians while reigning military explosives on a giant concentration camp. No part of this is complicated. No part of this is two-sided. On Tuesday, Israel killed a Palestinian baby girl who was born during the IDF bombing campaign on Gaza. They've been killing children so aggressively for so long now that they're starting to kill children who were born after the child-killing began. 17 days. Alamira Aisha got 17 days on this planet before being crushed to death by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Rafa, alongside her two-year-old brother Ahmed, and 25 others who'd been living in the same apartment building. She never knew a day of peace. A Washington Post investigative report into Israel's attack on al-Shifa Hospital has found that the evidence presented by the Israeli government falls short of showing that Hamas has been using the hospital as a command and control center. The Post reports it came to this conclusion after analysis of open source visuals, satellite imagery, and all of the publicly released IDF materials. At this point, the default assumption of any thinking person should be that all claims made by Israel are lies, until proven otherwise by mountains of rock-solid evidence. The belief that Israel is trying to avoid civilian casualties is based on literally nothing. It has no evidentiary basis whatsoever. People believe it because they want to. Because believing it is more emotionally comfortable than facing the obvious reality. There are two aspects to the war on journalism over Gaza. The first is a highly concentrated assault in Gaza itself where journalists are actively being assassinated, and the second is a worldwide assault where journalists who don't follow the official line are being purged. It's so weird watching Western rightists babble about how barbaric they think Muslims in their culture are while Western culture amasses a mountain of 10,000 child corpses in Gaza. When you see how effective the Houthis have been at using Yemen's critical location to shut down Red Sea traffic, you understand why the US spent years backing a horrific genocidal military campaign to try to get rid of them. It's not okay for progressive Democrats to talk about how sad and bad the Gaza massacre is and how important a ceasefire is without naming Biden, as though it's some remote foreign conflict that your president is just passively witnessing instead of actively facilitating. Biden backed a genocide in Gaza, sabotaged peace negotiations in Ukraine to launch a world-threatening proxy war, and now we're all praying that he doesn't launch a new full-scale war with Hezbollah and or Ansarullah. But you're still meant to fiercely support his reelection. Bush's wars were dumb when they happened under Bush, and they're even dumber now, two decades later, as they're happening again after learning precisely nothing. Claiming to support a two-state solution that Israel has never had any intention of permitting lets liberals pretend that they can support Israel without supporting murder, tyranny, apartheid, and abuse, and thus never need to experience any guilt or dissonance about their position. There's a single news story about international conflicts which keeps repeating itself again and again in different iterations, and that story is this. U.S. centralized empire fights to secure domination of planet Earth, and some populations resist this. You're seeing this story with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarullah today. That's what you've been seeing with all the standoffs with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. That's what you see with the U.S. centralized power structure when it terrorizes nations in Latin America like Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua. It's a giant empire attacking nations who have the temerity to insist on their own national sovereignty rather than being absorbed into the imperial blob. It uses full-scale wars, proxy conflicts, starvation sanctions and blockades, drone wars, CIA coups, and deliberately fermented color revolutions to subvert any government which defies the U.S. agenda of securing total planetary domination. If you can understand this, you can understand pretty much any major international conflict in modern times.