Writing:
My essay “The End of Reality” is up on The Shot. In it, I talk about the illegal war on Iran launched by Israel and the US, which was grossly supported by the West. We should all be alarmed by the outright break with reality that our elected leaders brazenly displayed, pretending that Iran was somehow the aggressor, and had “walked away from the negotiating table” that Israel blew up, or was in violation of any law relating to nuclear programs, all of which is untrue. I also mentioned how the creepy adherence to false narratives by colluding governments is not just going to become worse but will become near impossible to combat with the massive US govt investment in “AI” content generation, which will be used to create video evidence. The day after publication, this news article came out, showing Israel has already begun trialing this tactic.
Appearances:
I’ll be at the South Coast Readers & Writers Festival next weekend:
Books:
You can now pre-order the UK edition of The Nightmare Sequence here.
You can now pre-order the US edition of The Nightmare Sequence here.
All royalties will be donated to Palestinian charity.
I’m going to be direct, friends. Beyond public updates like the above, I will soon stop publishing free content - for the simple reason that I cannot afford it anymore. I have to put all my time and effort into generating money to meet my family’s needs. I have a three year old boy in childcare and a 5-month-old boy; my wife’s maternity leave is over and while she navigates slowly returning to work, I need to step up.
I’m now offering freelance editorial assessments of poetry and fiction manuscripts. If you’re reading this, you probably already know I’m the multi award-winning author of four poetry collections and a novel. I think it’s fair to say I know what I’m talking about when it comes to writing.
Consequently, my assessments will not be cheap. You can likely find cheaper quotes out there, but you will not find better. I’ll provide detailed comments on a number of chapters (up to 10K words for fiction or 15-20 pages of poetry) with a broader overview of the manuscript. Email me to discuss further.
You can also simply PayPal a tip to the above email address or hey, upgrade your subscription here:
Lastly, I want to end on the killing fields in Gaza, and the ongoing spiral into fascism that’s being fuelled by Zionists and white supremacists.
Two new articles from Haaretz have gone viral recently for deigning to report on what Palestinians have been telling us directly. The first is “100,000 dead: what we know about the true death toll in Gaza”.
There’s some really off language in this article that I don’t have the time to focus on, but may return to later. For now, I want to focus on the findings, which include the following: “…the war in the Gaza Strip is one of the bloodiest conflicts of the 21st century. Even if the overall number of war victims in Syria, Ukraine, and Sudan is higher in each case, Gaza is in first place in terms of the ratio of combatants to noncombatants killed, as well as in terms of rate of death relative to population size.
56 percent of those killed have been either children up to the age of 18, or women. The proportion of women and children killed via a violent death in Gaza is more than double the proportion in almost every other recent conflict, including, for example, the civil wars in Kosovo (20 percent), northern Ethiopia (9 percent), Syria (20 percent), Colombia (21 percent), Iraq (17 percent) and Sudan (23 percent).
Another extreme datum found in the study is the proportion of those killed relative to the population. "I think we're probably at something like 4 percent of the population killed," Spagat says, adding, "I'm not sure that there's another case in the 21st century that's reached that high.”
The other article is “It’s A Killing Field”:
This article quotes IDF soldiers saying that yes, they have been doing what we’ve all been seeing videos of every single day, which is firing indiscriminately into crowds of starving people. We are witnessing daily massacres in this genocide. Fuck Haaretz, to be clear - even in these two articles, it replicates Zionist language and talking points, its purpose is to engineer a sense of legitimacy through critical reporting. It is, in many ways, simply theatre. It is worth reflecting on, then, how even this theatre of a functioning society with critical journalism holding power to account vastly outpaces and outperforms the West, which will not allow even a semblance of this kind of reporting to make it to the mainstream.
Yesterday, in Lakemba, NSW Police violently disbanded a small group of peaceful protesters that had gathered outside a company which services major weapons manufacturers. Someone I know, and campaigned with recently, former Greens candidate Hannah Thomas, was present as a legal observer — she was assaulted, and sustained severe injuries to her face, requiring surgery. Doctors say she may lose vision in her right eye.
There is a clear relationship between the racist hysteria and defamatory smears that constitute coverage of Israel’s crimes against humanity, which constantly present anyone with a conscience as a threat or danger to “social cohesion”, and this kind of violence. You can see it in the disgusting comments on social media about incidents like these, which cheer on police brutality, and in the kind of rhetoric generated in response to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in NYC — a slavish, hysterical fixation on Zionist feelings, on the privilege of whiteness, which demands nothing less than total subservience to its primacy over everything else, and which always exacts a cost in racial violence.
Once again it must be reiterated: our government has been in criminal breach of the law for the past two years with its continuing support for the apartheid state which is carrying out daily massacres and starving a trapped population to death. Instead of sanctioning Israel and ending the arms trade - ending all support that facilitates the continuing massacres, they brutalise protestors, and facilitate Zionist censorship of artists and journalists.
Shame on all of us for allowing things to degenerate to this point of madness.
We can and we must do more to resist this rising fascism.
We are running out of time.
Salaam,
Omar