Pinball Shitshow

There is a sentence that almost never appears in Western coverage: Under international law, a people under military occupation have the right to resist that occupation. This is not a controversial claim. It is in the United Nations Charter. It is in the Geneva Conventions. It has been affirmed repeatedly by the UN General Assembly, explicitly referring to "all available means, including armed struggle." It is the same principle invoked to describe French resistance to Nazi occupation as heroic rather than terrorist. It is so uncontroversial that it doesn't need to be stated when applied to almost any other occupied people in history. When applied to Palestinians, it disappears. Not because it became false. Because the people who control which sentences appear in the news made a decision about which populations are permitted to have legally recognized rights that are spoken aloud in prime time. That decision is political. The silence around it is also political. The pretense that both are journalistic is the lie inside the lie.