It is often said that the victims of a terrible act can end up turning into an evil bully type character.
I think that is whatâs happening here to some degree. Its scandalous though.
The holocaust etc is absoluely on their minds but killing innocent Palestinians like this and at these levels is sick. It is a genocide.
This article by Howard Jacobson was published by the Guardian the other day. Itâs as awful and as stupid an article and a premise as Iâve ever read.
It really fucking fucking pains me to have to quote this Jonathan Cook fella, because I donât like him and Iâm pretty sure he has some very fucking stupid and awful opinions on other subjects given he retweets some of the internetâs worst tankies but his summing up of Howard Jacobsonâs article is spot on.
The Guardian gives British writer Howard Jacobson an inordinate amount of space to make a preposterous, antisemitic argument that amounts to nothing more than this:
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âJewsâ (his racist terminology, not mine) â also meaning any particular Jew, including the prime minister of Israel, apparently â are incapable of committing a genocide in Gaza because Jews themselves suffered a genocide in the Holocaust.
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Jews and the state of Israel are indistinguishable, according to Jacobson, both in the sense that critics supposedly think Jews, not Israel, are committing a genocide in Gaza, and in the sense, paradoxically, that Jacobson imagines Israel represents all Jews. (Heâs wrong on both counts.)
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Jacobson magnanimously accepts Israel can be criticised, but criticism of Israel must remain restrained and timorous at all times, even as thousands of Palestinian children are being slaughtered â otherwise, given the supposed truth of his two preceding claims, it counts as definitive proof of antisemitism.
Whatâs almost more shocking is that supposedly âliberalâ publications like the Guardian keep publishing preposterous apologias such as this one, whose transparent, sole purpose is to intimidate the rest of us into keeping quiet as a genocide unfolds in Gaza.
Donât disagree @Cheasty , where is Biden and Blinkens leadership on this though?
What are the ruling democratic party doing in the US?
Nowhere. And that is a disaster for the world because Trump will be in this time next year and democracy in America will end. Democracy in America ending is something that should terrify us.
Whatâs more is that this war will likely have precisely the effect Putin wanted which is to completely undermine western support for Ukraine which will end completely once Trump gets in.
Read back what Iâve written about this conflict and about Ukraine. Iâve been right all along. I called way out that the invasion would happen. Putinâs plan was always to wait it out until Trump got back in, and in the meantime to create chaos any way he could. Russia had to be beaten and beaten heavily and that meant going all in for the survival of the post World War II western order. But the people that are entrusted with the preservation of democracy and of decency in the world are not serious enough about it, theyâre dilettantes.
Iraq already severely undermined the westâs claim to be a moral arbiter. But this is much worse again.
Israel has always been the westâs achilles heel. It is a monster which has employed the ultimate moral blackmail of the Holocaust to buy the westâs silence as it steadily became a monster. The west cannot claim to be the worldâs moral arbiter when the west is so obviously hypocritical in standing by and supporting a genocide. Such claims to be a moral arbiter become laughable in the face of this grotesque double standard.
But the world needed and needs the post World War II western order to be a moral arbiter in the world because who the fuck else is going to be? Nobody. So with the total discrediting of the west as a moral arbiter and the likely entry of the US into the pro-Russia international fascist camp under Trump in a yearâs time, we will have a world which completely embraces the law of jungle and that is a fucking disaster.
We will see western societies tearing themselves apart as liberal democracy is seen to have completely discredited itself because it enabled a genocide, meanwhile the fascist propaganda machine of the American right wing will completely colonise European debate with total bullshit and lead to total chaos.
The culture of conspiracy thinking that tears societies apart and which has grown and grown and grown in America since September 11th, through the Iraq War and the financial crisis etc., this is Israelâs future too.
This kind of thinking develops in response to trauma, official failure, societal and official lust for revenge, then lies, anger at lies, a Mitchell and Webb âare we actually the baddies?â syndrome which leads to a deep form of guilt yet a deep form of denial, because the people who feel the guilt know that they themselves were the people who were most in a frenzy for revenge. This supposed âanti-warâ nonsense from Trumpâs support is a transparent fraud. They were the biggest cheerleaders of all for the Iraq War.
People lose their critical faculties and start believing mad, paranoid fantasies because they canât confront hard truths. The thing is, itâs hard to actually blame people who do lose their critical faculties in such a manner. They have been lied to, fed bullshit. They are victims, of a sort. All of Israeli society is the victim of appalling misrule by the likes of Netanyahu and his fascist buddies. Americans were victims too of George W. Bushâs appalling administration, though they created millions of far bigger victims abroad.
Unlike with Europe, where there is an existential threat from abroad in the form of Russia, the only existential threat to Israel comes from within. The existential threat to America - which is Trumpism, and all that goes with it like the mass paranoia and the mass throwing out of the most basic facts and reason in favour of QAnon etc., this threat has come from within, not from outside, though it has been constantly stoked and primed from outside by Russia, so in one sense it is an external threat.
Israel will suffer a similar fate to what America is suffering now. At least the US didnât suffer a large amount of dead hostages over which societal rage about the official response was free to spread like wildfire. Israel seems very likely to have this scenario and as a society it will very likely ultimately turn its rage against itself and tear itself apart as a society.
Outstanding post. I agree with you for the most part.
Ultimately. Two wrongs never make a right. The Israeli leadership are carrying out a genocide out of a brutal bullshit revenge perspective. Its terrible.
Blinken and Biden have serious questions to answer though - theyâre not making any genuine effort at all it seems like anyway.
Israel wonât stop here. Lads arenât going to just pack in slaughtering innocent civilians and go back to their 9-5 jobs.
This is absolutely true. Look at this country. There are people literally fantasising about being genocided by immigrants, as they themselves celebrate burning Dublin. The far right in this country and the far right everywhere (bar the minority of online ones with a platform who smell more money in cosplaying as fake pro-Palestine âhuman rights defendersâ) overwhelmingly supports Israel and they support the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, even though they hate Jews. They just hate Muslims more, and they love the jackboot, and they fantasise about committing such slaughter against immigrants in this country, just like Israel is committing against Palestinians now.
If you park everything for a minute @Cheasty , how disappointing and ultimately hypcritical are the democratic party in the US.
Theyâre co-signing a genocide in Gaza. I can see why people turn towards an alternative view.
Joe Biden is not responsible for this war and heâs not responsible for Russiaâs war against Ukraine. Heâs responsible for standing idly by.
Long standing US policy is that Israel has a special relationship with the US and is their number one ally in the world. But it is a one way relationship. It is Israel which holds all the power in the relationship, not the US. Israel is the only country in the world which holds the whip hand over the US.
This is because the Holocaust is the ultimate moral blackmail and the US has a large Jewish population and an unopposable Israel lobby where if you tell the truth about Israel you are destroyed by being labelled anti-Semitic.
Israelâs lobby also holds immense power in Europe and anybody who threatens it will be a target.
If you are in a relationship where interests will always predominate over morals, defending those interests at all costs will end up undoing you, and in the end destroy your moral credibility, and destroy your interests.
The fundamental problem is and has always been the nature of the US-Israel relationship and the power imbalance within it.
Biden just happened to be president when this happened. No other US president would have been any different. But it is on Bidenâs watch that any US claim as a moral arbiter will have collapsed.
Thereâs only one alternative to Biden. And that alternative is much, much, much worse again.
I honestly think weâre heading towards a long term situation where democracy collapses altogether in most of the world and is replaced by a system of ultra-corrupt fascist autocracies led by megalomaniacs who are allied to each other by extreme corruption and wealth hoarding. A lot of these countries will nominally remain âdemocraciesâ but they will be paper democracies where disinformation chaos rules to such an extent that the megalomaniac becomes seen as the only âstableâ choice. Russia style âdemocraciesâ.
The moral arbiter is the key point.
I think Biden has failed massively. I tend to agree it would probably be the same regardless of who was sitting thereâŚ
Ultimately though if Biden was stronger he could perhaps have kept Netanyahu in check. As it is, its the opposite.
How weak is Tony Blinken in fairness too.
I must be an outlier
I 100% support the Palestinian people and believe Israel is the nearest thing to a Nazi state as we have seen since the 1940âs
I also believe our country is being rode left right and centre with hordes of piss takers arriving here with not a notion of contributing to our society in any meaningful way.Only here for what they can take and fuck what anyone else thinks.Zero respect for us.And I blame the government for that along with the wet wipe brigade on here and their ilk.
11% of ârefugeesâ sent back out of thousands apparently.
Some useless cunts not doing their jobs in the relevant departments and they need to be held accountable before we have a plantation the like of which our descendants will be studying about in years to come.And we are heading that way.Its an utter shitshow.
Emigration into Ireland is a good thing. Overall the positives genuinely outweigh the negatives.
The problem Iâd have is people blackguarding us turning up without a passport etc.
Pointless statement. Like saying the Minster for Defense in Ireland has any say in anything serious.
Blinken is a government spokesman
I agree,of course I do but I dont want ghettos popping up here with welfare chancers and bad eggs.
We need a serious vetting process and our lads are not doing there job.Surely we can all agree on that?
Even if Biden wanted to keep Netanyahu in check, and I think he does - but I mean if he was extremely vocal and aggressive in public about it, it would still make no difference. Israel would be doing what it is doing anyway. Israel would simply ignore such a US president, and make sure that US president faced a firestorm of propaganda against them which would ensure their defeat at the next election. Israel laughs in the face of any resistance to its crimes from the US. It has all the power.
But in the long term, Israel has likely overreached here, because it will come to be seen by populations in Europe, increasingly the US, and the rest of the world, as no more than an evil bastard. And it will turn in on itself. But it will not lose its hold over the centres of power around the world. Outside of the hopeless victims of Gaza and Palestine, it will be Europe which feels the brunt of all this. Jewish people, Muslims, societies, as mass cynicism, mass conspiracism and racism grows ever stronger, and the problems of the world become ever more intractable.
Thats my point.They should be sent straight back -No ifs buts or maybe.
They have overreached. I think everyone would agree with that. I suppose in their defence they will say everyone around them wants them gone. Blown out of it etc.
The 7th October Hamas attack never seemed plausible. I canât fathom how that wasnât on their radar that day.
What would success look like for him? Heâs supported every democratic and republican war, heâs a zionist and a puppetâŚand blinken isnât any weaker than any of his predecessorsâŚheâs more than capable of bombing unarmed arabs.
Both biden and blinken have repeatedly stated that there are no restrictions, conditions or limits regarding how the Israelis use the weapons theyâre continuing to supply.
Theyâre as responsible as Netanyahu, and anyone condemning one without condemning the other isnât condemning either