The both-sides-have-their reasons-but-Israel-is-the-victim stories follow an expected pattern. Israeli Jews, still living in the shadow of the Holocaust, return to their rightful homes and then fight for every inch of what is justly theirs. They are repeatedly faced with intractable Arab terrorists who attack innocent civilians and must be crushed with all the might the Israeli military has at its disposal. Never Again! More

A key part of the story of America’s love affair with the gun is also how a romanticized fantasy of the American hunter gets invented—you know, Daniel Boone, Davey Crockett, all that. It’s completely fake. These were all commercial hunters. They didn’t even use the meat. It was for the furs. It was a huge fur industry. And it was all commercial. And the fur industry becomes a way, in part, to sell guns to everyone. It’s an incredible amount of violence but it’s all treated as something that is rather banal at the same time. More

Here in Mexico, the majority of people who have died from Covid-19 did not get tested, and so they weren’t counted in the official numbers. They do not exist in the numbers that the media repeats over and over, without ever contextualizing them, without ever explaining that they are almost meaningless because testing is so inaccessible here. More

There’s a theory that Israel controls US politics, that the most powerful war-making state the world has ever known is a mere puppet of Israel, institutionally incapable of asserting its own agenda in the Middle East. This is a convenient myth for both parties, since it makes Israel seem more powerful than it is and it tends to exculpate the US from direct complicity in ergregious human rights abuses. But in fact the US finances Israel. It is dependent on us. Its crimes are ours. We paid for them. More