https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/either-watch-the-footage-of-dead
Caitlin Johnstone
Dec 04, 2024

If you have not spent the past 14 months watching all the footage of dead and mutilated children coming out of Gaza, then you have no business trying to defend Israel and its actions. If you are avoiding looking at the facts, then you have no business talking about them.

Everyone who has spent these past 14 months bringing their attention to the concrete realities of the nightmare in Gaza has been living in an entirely different world than everyone who has not. A darker world. An uglier world. A world where living monsters prowl the earth.

Their dreams are worse. Their insides feel different. They experience the day to day moments of life in a whole other way.

The opinions of such a person about what is happening in Gaza do not have the same value as the opinions of someone who has avoided looking at these things. Someone who has not been watching the videos, looking at the photos, seeing the blown-out, burnt-up bodies, listening to the screaming children, reading the harrowing stories, is not equal in their ability to form lucid assessments about Gaza to someone who has. Their opinions have no merit, and their words on the subject can be dismissed.

Someone who supports Israel’s butchery in Gaza but has not spent the last 14 months bearing witness to the daily deluge of footage showing what that support entails is someone whose position is held together by psychological compartmentalization. They are only able to maintain their view of Israel and Palestine because they’ve been avoiding looking at the raw evidence of exactly what their position means. They’re like someone who eats meat but avoids learning about the harsh realities behind how it got to their dinner plate, because they know if they learned the truth about factory farming and saw how livestock are treated in our civilization it would reduce their ability to enjoy their favorite meals. Except with human beings instead of animals.

If you are only able to hold your worldview together by refusing to face the facts about it, then your worldview is garbage and your opinions suck. If you’ve been avoiding looking at what’s happening to people in Gaza while justifying all the death and destruction with some gibberish about human shields and October 7, then everything that comes out of your mouth about this issue is a lie, because it is only made possible by your own untruthful relationship with reality.

If you don’t want to face reality, then stop sharing your opinions about it. If you want to hide your head in the sand and dissociate from what’s really being done in your name then at least have the decency to shut up and spend your time in your fantasy land like a normal escapism addict. Stop annoying people by babbling about a subject that you cannot even bring yourself to deeply reckon with.