October 7th

The Kite Paradox: How PBS Accidentally Proved That “Good Zionism” Is a Fairy Tale for People Who Read Too Much Thomas Friedman

by damagecollateral
By Palestinian artist Khaled Hourani

By Collateral Damage (if Collateral Damage wrote like a person who just watched a toddler get shot and then got asked to “both sides” it)

So there you are, scrolling through the usual algorithmic slurry, when you stumble upon a PBS piece about Israel banning kites in Gaza.

Kites.

Not missiles. Not rockets. Not even slingshots. Kites. The kind of thing you flew as a snot-nosed kid while your dad grilled burnt hot dogs and pretended to care about your “technique.”

Your first instinct, if you have a pulse and a shred of moral reasoning left, is: That’s monstrous. Children under siege, starving, picking through rubble for fragments of their own dead relatives, and you’re telling me they can’t fly a goddamn kite? It’s like banning laughter in a leper colony. It’s cruelty as performance art.

But PBS, being PBS—the network that once made painting with Bob Ross feel like a geopolitical negotiation—preempts your outrage with a zinger. They show you the other kites. The ones Hamas rigged with incendiary devices. The ones that drifted over the fence and turned Israeli wheat fields into barbecue pits.

And suddenly, you’re supposed to feel reasonable. You’re supposed to nod along like a juror being handed a piece of evidence that flips the whole case. Oh, you think, well, if my neighbor kept launching flaming kites at my garage, I’d probably ban kites too.

And you’d be right. In a vacuum. In a world without context. In a world where you didn’t first kick that neighbor out of his own house, take his deed, burn his olive groves, fence him into a plot of land the size of a suburban mall parking lot, starve him, bomb him every eighteen months like clockwork, and call it “mowing the lawn”—as if human beings were crabgrass.

But here’s the part PBS doesn’t say, because PBS is funded by viewers like you, and viewers like you don’t want to hear that they’re complicit in a slow-motion land grab.

The part they don’t say is this: you have no right to live where you live.

You are not a neighbor. You are a squatter with an air force. You didn’t “return” to anything; you arrived with British passports and European guilt and a theology that conveniently demanded real estate. You stole the land, built the fence, and now you’re worried about kites?

So that initial disgust you felt—the gut punch of seeing children denied a piece of string and some tissue paper—that wasn’t a bug. That was your moral compass working. That was the part of you that hasn’t been colonized by think-tank jargon and State Department press releases.

What PBS did, unintentionally, was force the question that nobody in polite company is allowed to ask aloud:

How do we let Palestinian kids fly kites without making Israelis feel unsafe?

And the answer—the one they won’t print, the one that gets you uninvited from dinner parties in Bethesda—is:

We don’t.

We stop worrying about the safety of occupiers. We stop treating “Israeli anxiety” as a variable that must be balanced against Palestinian life. We stop pretending that the guy who took your house deserves the same consideration as you do when he complains about the noise from your refugee tent.

You want safety? Let Palestinians come back home and get the full equality they deserve. If you can’t tolerate that, if equality is an existential threat to you, then go home. Not to “Judea and Samaria”—to actual home. Warsaw. Brooklyn. Morocco. Wherever your great-grandparents packed their bags before they decided that manifest destiny was a Jewish problem too.

Because here’s the paradox PBS accidentally handed us on a silver platter:

You cannot have “good Zionism.” You cannot have “ethical occupation.” You cannot have a “humane apartheid.” It’s like “healthy cigarettes” or “gentle decapitation.” The premise is the punchline.

The moment you accept that Israel has a right to exist—on that land, in that way, with that history—you are forced into a labyrinth of cognitive dissonance where banning kites becomes a reasonable defense measure, and bombing children becomes “self-defense,” and starving a million people becomes “pressure tactics.”

But the moment you reject that premise—the moment you say, “Actually, no, the land belongs to the people who were living there before the guys with the guns showed up”—the whole house of cards collapses.

And then you’re left with the only conclusion that makes sense:

Palestinian children should fly kites. Israeli settlers should pack bags. And PBS should stop pretending that showing two sides of a story is the same as telling the truth.

Because sometimes, there is only one side.

And it’s the one that’s been buried under eighty years of carefully worded press releases, congressional resolutions, and the quiet, comfortable racism of people who think “complexity” is a synonym for “don’t look too close.”

So fly your kite, kid. Fly it high.

And let the occupiers choke on the string.

The New York Times’ Recurring Gift of Poisoned Honey: How a Genocide Apologist Machine Pretends to Have a Conscience

by damagecollateral

You probably heard the buzz. The New York Times, in its infinite wisdom, decided to let Nicholas Kristof—its resident paternalistic center-left tourist—wander into the opinion pages this week to write about the sexual torture of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.

And look, full disclosure: the piece is, in its raw content, damning. Kristof documents a horrifying pattern of abuse that deserves condemnation. But if you think this is a turning point for the Gray Lady, you haven’t been paying attention for the last two years. This isn’t journalism. It’s a restoration project. It’s the Times trying to sandblast the blood off its own hands while charging you for a subscription.

The Gore S’more

Here is the Collateral Damage Rule of Mainstream Genocide Coverage: They will tell you the truth, but only if they can wrap it in two layers of bullshit.

Kristof does this masterfully. He spends paragraphs documenting systematic rape—including the dog allegations, which we now understand are medically plausible and supported by multiple survivor testimonies. But then, like a priest hedging his bets before a mob boss, he bookends the whole thing with the Times’ favorite Zio-lore: the “Hamas rape” narrative of October 7th.

Let’s be clear-eyed about this. The Times published a series of free-of-evidence “reports”—framed as news, not opinion—that claimed to document systematic sexual violence by Hamas. When Israel is the accused? It’s an opinion column. When Palestinians are the accused? It’s front-page news. As the group Writers Against the War on Gaza noted, the Times has spent this entire war acting as a “mouthpiece for American imperialism,” advising its own reporters to avoid words like “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing.”

Months ago, a group of surgeons who volunteered in Gaza gave horrifying testimony. Dr. Mark Perlmutter, an American surgeon, told the press—and later the courts—that he and the rest of the group witnessed a clear pattern of Palestinian children presenting to the ER with sniper shots to the head.

Where was that published? If you said “the opinion section” or ignored entirely, give yourself a cigar. The Times didn’t treat that as a news flash. Because the narrative didn’t have a “both sides” hook.

But this Kristof piece? It’s designed to do two things:

  1. Restore credibility with the anti-war left.
  2. Whitewash the paper’s history of aiding and abetting ethnic cleansing.

The Times is still facing a lawsuit from Israel over this very piece, which they’ve labeled a “blood libel.” And while I have zero sympathy for Bibi Netanyahu’s legal intimidation tactics—the lawsuit is likely a sham to stifle speech—the dance is instructive. The Times gets to play the martyr for press freedom while also laundering propaganda.

The Boycott We Actually Need

Here is the hardest truth for the anti-imperialist crowd to swallow: Sharing this article as a “win” for Palestine makes you look like an opportunist.

You cannot spend six months screaming “Boycott the Times!” only to turn around and post a gift link to Kristof because he finally said something you liked. That is the definition of being played. The Times is counting on you to do that. They want the clicks. They want to show advertisers that even their critics can’t look away.

As the saying goes, the Times published a piece that confirms the Times has been lying to you for a year, and they want a medal for it.

The only correct response is to amplify independent journalists—the ones who have been reporting on this torture for months without the “opinion” label—while calling for a boycott of the imperialist mouthpiece.

A world without the New York Times as the gatekeeper of war crimes is a world less dangerous. I really, truly, from the bottom of my heart, hope the lawsuit or simple bankruptcy brings it to its knees. It can’t happen soon enough.