Some themes in chaos machine-ing

Today's Gaza aid murders + Jon Stewart explains what's going on inside Tucker Carlson's mind palace

I’m not doing an AMA podcast today because I actually can’t face a camera. I woke to the news of the Israeli army firing on starving Palestinians as they tried to access aid and food. 1100 people were murdered or injured in minutes. I’m raging and shocked by the depravity.

I rang my Palestinian peace broker friend Aziz Abu Sarah to get some perspective and to ask the question that came up in the conversation following last week’s post:

What should we be doing to help the peace makers right now?

Aziz and I are doing a to and fro and I’ll come back to you next week on his advice. I need to digest it. His short answer is that there is no peace brokering going on just now, and that the focus is on stopping the killing and starving of humans.

Meantime, and relatedly, let’s touch on the idea of chaos-as-tactic

I feel that creating chaos is a war tactic that we need to be alive to. It’s also, broadly, being adopted by narcissists, gas-lighters, the nefarious, the corrupt, the inhumane in many aspects of life today. It needs to be identified and called out. I’ll get to why, below.

I listened to a Radio National interview this morning with Jeremy Konyndyk, President of Refugees International and former head of the US’s Foreign Disaster Assistance program, describing some of the detail behind the aid and food delivery massacre, which some US Press are calling a “chaotic incident”.

According to Konyndyk, who had watched the footage of the slaughter, the “chaos” ensued because the delivery was conducted by the Israeli Army, not by experienced humanitarian aid organisations, which - as we know - have been denied entry into Gaza.