You almost want to feel sorry for Israel’s professional apologists in mainstream media these days. Their job, a fetid one at best, has been especially trying lately.
First they assure us that Israel has no intention of committing a genocide – and right away they’re refuted by Israel’s own prime minister, who loudly demands the extermination of every man, woman and child in Gaza, not to mention its president’s equally public insistence that Palestinian civilians are legitimate military targets.
Then they struggle to excuse Israel’s bloody attack on one Gaza hospital, only to end up watching Israel’s killing machine obliterate literally all of them. (Not to mention making a mockery of the excuses by providing no evidence that there was ever a “Hamas command center” under al-Shifa, the first of those destroyed hospitals, to begin with.)
Then they try to divert attention from Israeli atrocities by yelping about “mass rape” supposedly committed by the Palestinian fighters who burst from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7. But the ink is hardly dry on their indignant op-eds before their masters in the Chosen State confess that they have no victim testimonies, no forensic evidence and no reliable witnesses to back up any of the claims.
What’s an apologist to do?
Well, if you’re a staff writer at the Atlantic – where rationalizing Israeli crime is a specialty of the house – you can fall back on the lamest canard of all: that the public disgust stirred by Israel’s worst-yet mass murder campaign against Palestinians is really a product of rising “anti-Semitism.”
And sure enough, Atlantic’s April number sports a feature story to that effect by one Franklin Foer with the lachrymose title “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – because, don’t you see, Americans couldn’t possibly have a respectable motive for getting worked up over a genocide.
Mind you, it takes some high-octane chutzpah to pretend that today’s Big Story is the end of an era for American Jews, at the very moment when American-made bombs and artillery shells are pulverizing Gaza and exterminating its population (half of which consists of children), to the applause of virtually every Jewish communal organization the world over, including inside the US.
But Foer doesn’t lack chutzpah. He’s not only prepared to claim victimhood for Jewish genocide supporters on the grounds that their sachems haven’t been able to stifle all public dissent. He also wants you to believe that the decline of American Jewish power isn’t due to public backlash against bullying by Jewish organizations (think AIPAC, or the sadly misnamed Anti-Defamation League); nor to the exposure of illegal spending sprees with government funds by various Hasidic institutions; nor even to the racist blood lust expressed by almost every prominent Orthodox rabbi in the US since Israel’s genocidal campaign began last October.
No, according to Foer, the real trouble is what he calls “anti-Semitism on the right and the left” – which I guess means “everywhere,” in the US at least. And he’s even prepared to insist that this “anti-Semitism” is not only bad for the Jews; it threatens the American republic, too.
“Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism,” Foer claims. But now, “that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements – MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other – would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.” Ah, the unaccountable ingratitude of those goyim! I mean – what’s a little genocide between friends?
Setting to one side Foer’s self-righteous reading of American political history, any claim that today’s United States is awash in anti-Semitism is obviously silly. Quite apart from opinion polls – which tell a tale very different from Foer’s – popular culture is a convenient point of reference in such matters, and it’s hard to see how a society permeated with Jew-hatred would have showered no fewer than twenty Oscar nominations last year on films that celebrate already-famous American Jews. And then there’s the large number of American Jews who have participated in the anti-genocide protests that so trouble Foer – a datum that, standing alone, suffices to refute his imputation of anti-Jewish bigotry to the protesters.
But Foer is right about one thing. A privileged chapter in diaspora Jewish history is coming to an end – though not for the reason he gives. The simple truth (though Foer cannot admit it) is that the American public is getting tired of being bullied by a greedy and hypersensitive Jewish elite that, like a spoiled child, has insisted on having its way for years in everything from Mideast policy to the distribution of government benefits, and is now finally overplaying its hand.
And if that Jewish “leadership” really has squandered its measure of imperially-funded impunity by embracing a genocide – at a moment when the fabric of US politics is too strained for an ultra-divisive issue and too cash-poor to give away the extra billions that Israel is demanding to finance its crimes – it is quite possible that Foer has stumbled onto another truth as well: that the wreckage from the fall of the Jewish elite will doom whatever is left of American democracy.
To make sense of these claims, a short summary of recent history is in order. It is well known that since the end of World War II Jews in the West have come to enjoy a degree of freedom, prosperity and political influence that is without precedent in the Jewish diaspora.
Unsurprisingly, American Jews have generally welcomed this development. And given the horrors that preceded it, culminating in the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the 1940s, it’s not hard to understand why Jewish elites in the US focused at first on securing their hard-won position in any way they could, taking advantage of new opportunities and assimilating themselves to preexisting power structures.
But after 1967, as Israel settled into a new role as one of Washington’s key client states, what had been prudence morphed into braggadocio. Norman Podhoretz set the tone, vowing that henceforth American Jews would “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm” – a boast that meant in practice (to quote the superb scholar Norman Finkelstein) that “American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.”
Less privileged constituencies may be forgiven for not seeing that period as a “golden age,” as Foer does, but you can reject his twisted perspective and still agree that the postwar joy ride of Jewish “leadership” is probably coming to an end.
After all, why shouldn’t it?
Today’s United States is not the United States of 1945, nor even the United States of 1967. The American public now is as deeply divided as in the last decades of the 18th century, when armed rebellions and secession plots were recurring realities. The presidential election scheduled for this November – assuming it happens at all (the Democratic Party seems to be trying to convert the balloting system into a prearranged election-by-lawfare) – is likely to exacerbate differences rather than resolve them, with potentially disastrous results. Worse, given the massive attack on civil rights that was launched four years ago on the pretext of a COVID-19 “medical emergency” – an attack that included the deliberate undermining of the electoral process in many states – it is not even clear whether the necessary conditions for democracy exist any longer in the US.
Meanwhile, consumer prices have skyrocketed, workers are suffering massive layoffs, and the small business economy, crippled by the COVID coup, has been unable to compensate for the damage.
Why should a citizenry in such straits continue to give preferential treatment to an overbearing Jewish elite that 1) clearly doesn’t need it, and 2) flaunts its allegiance to a foreign power even as it demands favors from American institutions at every opportunity? (Anyone who needs an introduction to the fraudulent practices this elite will resort to, and the extent to which it has entangled US government in its chicanery, need only read Norman Finkelstein’s copiously documented The Holocaust Industry for some useful details.) By any standard, American Jews have enjoyed an extraordinary run over the last fifty years; it’s about time we were treated just like everybody else – no worse, but no better either.
The (mis)behavior of Jewish “leadership” is exacerbating the problem. Instead of absorbing the message of the writing on the wall and prudently lowering its profile, it is going for broke, intensifying its financial and political demands in support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter – the worst possible issue seized at the worst possible moment. Not even warning growls from old allies like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have had any noticeable effect. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jewish “leaders” seem intent on plunging ahead toward their own inevitable destruction.
And I fear that they will not fall alone. Gaza is far from being Joe Biden’s only problem this year. But as the Palestinian death toll soars, and the pictures of shredded or starving children become ever more numerous and intolerable, the Gaza genocide could end up being the last straw that breaks the back of Biden’s reelection propaganda.
Genocide Joe’s problem with Gaza is that there is no real escape from it: Biden cannot ignore the issue but also cannot afford to resolve it. If he grows an embryonic conscience and finally brings Israel to heel (at least temporarily), he will pay a heavy price with Jewish voting blocs in November. If he doesn’t, a regional Mideast war could be in the offing, and I doubt that any American administration could survive the fallout from such a debacle.
I am not about to shed any tears for Joe Biden or for the Democratic Party. But if the current government collapses, what will replace it? An ad hoc coalition around the former Narcissist-in-Chief? A caretaker administration effectively under the sway of US intelligence agencies? A COVID coup-inspired government by executive fiat? The prospects are not encouraging.
Meanwhile, the 1,000 American troops now being sent to Israel/Palestine – ostensibly to build a “humanitarian port” for Gaza – may end up, for all I know, as a striking force behind a coup designed to oust Netanyahu and to put the US directly in control of a client state gone rogue. No one familiar with the CIA’s record can rule out such a possibility. But how will an American working class that already resents the billions of dollars annually thrown away on “aid” to Israel (while average American families can’t pay the rent and the heating bill at the same time) react to the idea of turning the Jewish State into an expensive US protectorate? What if those American troops start dying in new wars in Lebanon or Iran? How much can Americans be expected to pay for Israel’s rapaciousness?
I certainly do not know where any of this will lead. But I’m finding it very hard to imagine a happy ending to the story. I’ve already mentioned my doubts about whether the presuppositions required of a democracy exist in today’s United States. One of those presuppositions is the assumption of shared goals (Lessing, following Aristotle, went so far as to describe this as “friendship”) between the members of differing political factions. But can I really acknowledge any sort of common cause with a supporter of genocide? To be honest, I’m still not sure I can use a word like “friendship” to describe my relationship to someone who, just a few years ago, denied my right of movement, my right to be governed by democratic processes, my right to speak my mind without being censored, my right not to be a human guinea pig, and even my right to breathe freely. And I can’t forget that there were many, many such people.
What I’m finding really ominous is that so many enemies of American freedom over the last four years are now quietly cozying up to Israel’s genocide lest they upset the Democratic Party applecart – and are demanding that the American public do the same. Rebecca Solnit, one of those “progressive feminists” who helped to publicize every democracy-destroying lie of the COVID coup, from masks to coerced human medical experimentation, doesn’t mince words about the dangers of Republican politicians: according to her, they have “abandoned all ethics and standards, and will happily violate the oaths they took to uphold the constitution”; in fact, she claims that “[v]iral Trumpism has already merged with conspiracy theories such as QAnon, with anti-vaccine cults, with white supremacists and neo-fascists.” But the prolific Ms. Solnit has gone strangely tongue-tied about the slaughter-plus-systematic-starvation of more than a million children in Gaza.
Gloria Steinem, another “progressive” who bailed on the “my body, my choice” principle as soon as a Democratic Party administration demanded the injection of federal employees with untested drugs, was quick to denounce Palestinians over charges of sexual violence that were probably fabricated. But she too has been practically silent about the slaughter in Gaza, not to mention the well-documented sexual violence committed by Israelis against female Palestinian prisoners. And so on, and so on, and so on.
I mention these examples because I think they expose, like a lantern in a shadowy room, the cruel emptiness belied by all the liberal gesturing. The tragic truth is that the Democratic Party and its mouthpieces are not offering us an alternative to Donald Trump. They are using Trump’s name as hunters use beaters, to induce frightened prey to stampede into their nets. They are not, as some critics believe, political ideologues; they are really more like political parasites, forced to feed on the vital energies and principles of others because they have none themselves.
That is where Democratic Party apologists meet the crime-rationalizing rhetoricians of American Jewish “leadership.” Even genocide, the most heinous of all crimes against humanity, doesn’t move such people, because where they should have hearts capable of empathy with suffering or of anger at injustice, all they’ve really got is a craving for power and a dread of losing it.
And so it turns out that the Jewish elites who are hell-bent on maintaining their undeserved privileges – so much so that they’ll embrace Nazi crimes to do it – are forcing the pitiful hollowness of America’s political elites into public view. That is the real disaster that Franklin Foer, who wants to keep both elites in power, cannot see. His pastiche of anodyne falsehoods is intended to divert public attention from the horror of Israel’s intensifying crimes in occupied Palestine. But he is really laying the groundwork for the radical disillusionment of the American public – a disillusionment that could bring down the entire political process when a generation of its victims realizes how recklessly and how cynically it has been deceived.
Yes, the American Jewish joy ride is probably about to end – and with a bang, not a whimper. The real questions are all about what happens next. How many Americans (and others) are going to be hurt in the crash? How many will get out of the way in time? How many will be ready with aid for the victims when the debris finally settles?
And what will be left – after so much cruel and needless damage – of what we used to call “the land of the free, the home of the brave”?
From obscuring the West’s role in starving Gaza to sensationalised accounts of mass rape by Hamas, journalists are playing the role of propagandists, not reporters.
The past five months have been clarifying. What was supposed to be hidden has been thrust into the light. What was supposed to be obscured has come sharply into focus.
Liberal democracy is not what it seems.
It has always defined itself in contrast to what it says it is not. Where other regimes are savage, it is humanitarian. Where others are authoritarian, it is open and tolerant. Where others are criminal, it is law-abiding. When others are belligerent, it seeks peace. Or so the manuals of liberal democracy argue.
But how to keep the faith when the world’s leading liberal democracies – invariably referred to as “the West” – are complicit in the crime of crimes: genocide?
Not just law-breaking or a misdemeanour, but the extermination of a people. And not just quickly, before the mind has time to absorb and weigh the gravity and extent of the crime, but in slow motion, day after day, week after week, month after month.
What kind of system of values can allow for five months the crushing of children under rubble, the detonation of fragile bodies, the wasting away of babies, while still claiming to be humanitarian, tolerant, peace-seeking?
And not just allow all this, but actively assist in it. Supply the bombs that blow those children to pieces or bring houses down on them, and sever ties to the only aid agency that can hope to keep them alive.
The answer, it seems, is the West’s system of values.
The mask has not just slipped, it has been ripped off. What lies beneath is ugly indeed.
Depravity on show
The West is desperately trying to cope. When Western depravity is fully on show, the public’s gaze has to be firmly directed elsewhere: to the truly evil ones.
They are given a name. It is Russia. It is Al Qaeda, and Islamic State. It is China. And right now, it is Hamas.
There must be an enemy. But this time, the West’s own evil is so hard to disguise, and the enemy so paltry – a few thousand fighters underground inside a prison besieged for 17 years – that the asymmetry is difficult to ignore. The excuses are hard to swallow.
Is Hamas really so evil, so cunning, so much of a threat that it requires mass slaughter? Does the West really believe that the attack of 7 October warrants the killing, maiming and orphaning of many, many tens of thousands of children as a response?
To stamp out such thoughts, Western elites have had to do two things. First, they have tried to persuade their publics that the acts they collude in are not as bad as they look. And then that the evil perpetrated by the enemy is so exceptional, so unconscionable it justifies a response in kind.
Which is exactly the role Western media has played over the past five months.
Starved by Israel
To understand how Western publics are being manipulated, just look to the coverage – especially from those outlets most closely aligned not with the right but with supposedly liberal values.
How have the media dealt with the 2.3 million Palestinians of Gaza being gradually starved to death by an Israeli aid blockade, an action that lacks any obvious military purpose beyond inflicting a savage vengeance on Palestinian civilians? After all, Hamas fighters will outlast the young, the sick and the elderly in any mediaeval-style, attritional war denying Gaza food, water and medicines.
A headline in the New York Times, for example, told readers last month, “Starvation is stalking Gaza’s children”, as if this were a famine in Africa – a natural disaster, or an unexpected humanitarian catastrophe – rather than a policy declared in advance and carefully orchestrated by Israel’s top echelons.
The Financial Times offered the same perverse framing: “Starvation stalks children of northern Gaza”.
But starvation is not an actor in Gaza. Israel is. Israel is choosing to starve Gaza’s children. It renews that policy each day afresh, fully aware of the terrible price being inflicted on the population.
As the head of Medical Aid for Palestinians warned of developments in Gaza: “Children are being starved at the fastest rate the world has ever seen.”
Last week Unicef, the United Nations children’s emergency fund, declared that a third of children aged under two in northern Gaza were acutely malnourished. Its executive director, Catherine Russell, was clear: “An immediate humanitarian cease-fire continues to provide the only chance to save children’s lives and end their suffering.”
Were it really starvation doing the stalking, rather than Israel imposing starvation, the West’s powerlessness would be more understandable. Which is what the media presumably want their readers to infer.
But the West isn’t powerless. It is enabling this crime against humanity – day after day, week after week – by refusing to exert its power to punish Israel, or even to threaten to punish it, for blocking aid.
Not only that, but the US and Europe have helped Israel starve Gaza’s children by denying funding to the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, the main humanitarian lifeline in the enclave.
All of this is obscured – meant to be obscured – by headlines that transfer the agency for starving children to an abstract noun rather than a country with a large, vengeful army.
Attack on aid convoy
Such misdirection is everywhere – and it is entirely intentional. It is a playbook being used by every single Western media outlet. It was all too visible when an aid convoy last month reached Gaza City, where levels of Israeli-induced famine are most extreme.
In what has come to be known by Palestinians as the “Flour Massacre”, Israel shot into large crowds desperately trying to get food parcels from a rare aid convoy to feed their starving families. More than 100 Palestinians were killed by the gunfire, or crushed by Israeli tanks or hit by trucks fleeing the scene. Many hundreds more were seriously wounded.
It was an Israeli war crime – shooting on civilians – that came on top of an Israeli crime against humanity – starving two million civilians to death.
“The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off”
The Israeli attack on those waiting for aid was not a one-off. It has been repeated several times, though you would barely know it, given the paucity of coverage.
The depravity of using aid convoys as traps to lure Palestinians to their deaths is almost too much to grasp.
But that is not the reason the headlines that greeted this horrifying incident so uniformly obscured or soft-soaped Israel’s crime.
For any journalist, the headline should have written itself: “Israel accused of killing over 100 as crowd waits for Gaza aid.” Or: “Israel fires into food aid crowd. Hundreds killed and injured”
But that would have accurately transferred agency to Israel – Gaza’s occupier for more than half a century, and its besieger for the last 17 years – in the deaths of those it has been occupying and besieging. Something inconceivable for the Western media.
So the focus had to be shifted elsewhere.
BBC contortions
The Guardian’s contortions were particularly spectacular: “Biden says Gaza food aid-related deaths complicate ceasefire talks”.
The massacre by Israel was disappeared as mysterious “food aid-related deaths”, which in turn became secondary to the Guardian’s focus on the diplomatic fallout.
Readers were steered by the headline into assuming that the true victims were not the hundreds of Palestinians killed and maimed by Israel but the Israeli hostages whose chances of being freed had been “complicated” by “food aid-related deaths”.
The headline on a BBC analysis of the same war crime – now reframed as an author-less “tragedy” – repeated the New York Times’ trick: “Aid convoy tragedy shows fear of starvation haunts Gaza”.
Another favourite manoeuvre, again pioneered by the Guardian, was to cloud responsibility for a clear-cut war crime. Its front-page headline read: “More than 100 Palestinians die in chaos surrounding Gaza aid convoy”.
Once again, Israel was removed from the crime scene. In fact, worse, the crime scene was removed too. Palestinians “died” apparently because of poor aid management. Maybe UNRWA was to blame.
Chaos and confusion became useful refrains for media outlets keener to shroud culpability. The Washington Postdeclared: “Chaotic aid delivery turns deadly as Israeli, Gazan officials trade blame”. CNN took the same line, downgrading a war crime to a “chaotic incident”.
But even these failings were better than the media’s rapidly waning interest as Israel’s massacres of Palestinians seeking aid became routine – and therefore harder to mystify.
A few days after the Flour Massacre, an Israeli air strike on an aid truck in Deir al-Balah killed at least nine Palestinians, while last week more than 20 hungry Palestinians were killed by Israeli helicopter gunfire as they waited for aid.
“Food aid-related” massacres – which had quickly become as normalised as Israel’s invasions of hospitals – no longer merited serious attention. A search suggests the BBC managed to avoid giving significant coverage to either incident online.
Food-drop theatrics
Meanwhile, the media has ably assisted Washington in its various deflections from the collaborative crime against humanity of Israel imposing a famine on Gaza compounded by the US and Europe de-funding UNRWA, the only agency that could mitigate that famine.
British and US broadcasters excitedly joined air crews as their militaries flew big-bellied planes over Gaza’s beaches, at great expense, to drop one-off ready-made meals to a few of the starving Palestinians below.
Given that many hundreds of truckloads of aid a day are needed just to stop Gaza sliding deeper into famine, the drops were no more than theatrics. Each delivered at best a solitary truckload of aid – and then only if the palettes didn’t end up falling into the sea, or killing the Palestinians they were meant to benefit.
The operation deserved little more than ridicule.
Instead, dramatic visuals of heroic airmen, interspersed with expressions of concern about the difficulties of addressing the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza, usefully distracted viewers’ attention not only from the operations’ futility but from the fact that, were the West really determined to help, it could strong-arm Israel into letting in far more plentiful aid by land at a moment’s notice.
The media were equally swept up by the Biden administration’s second, even more outlandish scheme to help starving Palestinians. The US is to build a temporary floating pier off Gaza’s coast so that aid shipments can be delivered from Cyprus.
The plot holes were gaping. The pier will take two months or more to construct, when the aid is needed now. In Cyprus, as at the land crossings into Gaza, Israel will be in charge of inspections – the main cause of hold-ups.
And if the US now thinks Gaza needs a port, why not also get to work on a more permanent one?
The answer, of course, might remind audiences of the situation before 7 October, when Gaza was under a stifling 17-year siege by Israel – the context for Hamas’ attack that the Western media never quite finds the space to mention.
For decades, Israel has denied Gaza any connections to the outside world it cannot control, including preventing a sea port from being built and bombing the enclave’s only airport way back in 2001, shortly after it was opened.
And yet, at the same time, Israel’s insistence that it no longer occupies Gaza – just because it has done so at arm’s length since 2005 – is accepted unquestioningly in media coverage.
Again, the US has decisive leverage over Israel, its client state, should it decide to exercise it – not least billions in aid and the diplomatic veto it wields so regularly on Israel’s behalf.
The question that needs asking by the media on every piece about “starvation stalking Gaza” is why is the US not using that leverage.
In a typical breathless piece titled “How the US military plans to construct a pier and get food into Gaza”, the BBC ignored the big picture to drill down enthusiastically on the details of “huge logistical” and “security challenges” facing Biden’s project.
The article revisited precedents from disaster relief operations in Somalia and Haiti to the D-Day Normandy landings in the Second World War.
Credulous journalists
In support of these diversionary tactics, the media have also had to accentuate the atrocities of Hamas’ 7 October attack – and the need to condemn the group at every turn – to contrast those crimes from what might otherwise appear even worse atrocities committed by Israel on the Palestinians.
That has required an unusually large dose of credulousness from journalists who more usually present as hard-bitten sceptics.
Babies being beheaded, or put in ovens, or hung out on clothes lines. No invented outrage by Hamas has been too improbable to have been denied front-page treatment, only to be quietly dropped later when each has turned out to be just as fabricated as it should have sounded to any reporter familiar with the way propagandists exploit the fog of war.
Similarly, the entire Western press corps has studiously ignored months of Israeli media revelations that have gradually shifted responsibility for some of the the most gruesome incidents of 7 October – such as the burning of hundreds of bodies – off Hamas’ shoulders and on to Israel’s.
Though Western media outlets failed to note the significance of his remarks, Israeli spokesman Mark Regev admitted that Israel’s numbering of its dead from 7 October had to be reduced by 200 because many of the badly charred remains turned out to be Hamas fighters.
Testimonies from Israeli commanders and officials show that, blindsided by the Hamas attack, Israeli forces struck out wildly with tank shells and Hellfire missiles, incinerating Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives indiscriminately. The burnt cars piled up as a visual signifier of Hamas’ sadism are, in fact, evidence of, at best, Israel’s incompetence and, at worst, its savagery.
The secret military protocol that directed Israel’s scorched-earth policy on 7 October – the notorious Hannibal procedure to stop any Israeli being taken captive – appears not to have merited mention by either the Guardian or the BBC in their acres of 7 October coverage.
Despite their endless revisiting of the 7 October events, neither has seen fit to report on the growing demands from Israeli families for an investigation into whether their loved ones were killed under Israel’s Hannibal procedure.
Nor have either the BBC or the Guardian reported on the comments of the Israeli military’s ethics chief, Prof Asa Kasher, bewailing the army’s resort to the Hannibal procedure on 7 October as “horrifying” and “unlawful”.
Claims of bestiality
Instead, liberal Western media outlets have repeatedly revisited claims that they have seen evidence – evidence they seem unwilling to share – that Hamas ordered rape to be used systematically by its fighters as a weapon of war. The barely veiled implication is that such depths of depravity explain, and possibly justify, the scale and savagery of Israel’s response.
Note that this claim is quite different from the argument that there may have been instances of rape on 7 October.
That is for good reason: There are plenty of indications that Israeli soldiers regularly use rape and sexual violence against Palestinians. A UN report in February addressing allegations that Israeli solders and officials had weaponised sexual violence against Palestinian women and girls since 7 October elicited none of the headlines and outrage from the Western media directed at Hamas.
To make a plausible case that Hamas changed the rules of war that day, much greater deviance and sinfulness has been required. And the liberal Western media have willingly played their part by recycling claims of mass, systematic rape by Hamas, combined with lurid claims of necrophilic perversions – while suggesting anyone who asks for evidence is condoning such bestiality.
But the liberal media’s claims of Hamas “mass rapes” – initiated by an agenda-setting piece by the New York Times and closely echoed by the Guardian weeks later – have crumbled on closer inspection.
Independent outlets such as Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, the Grayzone and others have gradually pulled apart the Hamas mass rape narrative.
But perhaps most damaging of all has been an investigation by the Intercept that revealed it was senior Times editors who recruited a novice Israeli journalist – a former Israeli intelligence official with a history of supporting genocidal statements against the people of Gaza – to do the field work.
More shocking still, it was the paper’s editors who then pressured her to find the story. In violation of investigative norms, the narrative was reverse engineered: imposed from the top, not found through on-the-ground reporting.
‘Conspiracy of silence’
The New York Times’ story appeared in late December under the headline “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7”. The Guardian’s follow-up in mid-January draws so closely on the Times’ reporting that the paper has been accused of plagiarism. Its headline was: “Evidence points to systematic use of rape and sexual violence by Hamas in 7 October attacks”.
However, under questioning from the Intercept, a spokesperson for the New York Times readily walked back the paper’s original certainty, conceding instead that “there may have been systematic use of sexual assault.” [emphasis added] Even that appears too strong a conclusion.
Holes in the Times’ reporting quickly proved so glaring that its popular daily podcast pulled the plug on an episode dedicated to the story after its own fact check.
The rookie reporter assigned to the task, Anat Schwartz, has admitted that despite scouring the relevant institutions in Israel – from medical institutions to rape crisis centres – she found no one who could confirm a single example of sexual assault that day. She was also unable to find any forensic corroboration.
She later told a podcast with Israel’s Channel 12 that she viewed the lack of evidence to be proof of “a conspiracy of silence”.
Instead, Schwartz’s reporting relied on a handful of testimonies from witnesses whose other easily disprovable assertions should have called into question their credibility. Worse, their accounts of instances of sexual assault failed to tally with the known facts.
One paramedic, for example, claimed two teenage girls had been raped and killed at Kibbutz Nahal Oz. When it became clear nobody fitted the description there, he changed the crime scene to Kibbutz Beeri. None of the dead there fitted the description either.
Nonetheless, Schwartz believed she finally had her story. She told Channel 12: “One person saw it happen in Be’eri, so it can’t be just one person, because it’s two girls. It’s sisters. It’s in the room. Something about it is systematic, something about it feels to me that it’s not random.”
Schwartz got further confirmation from Zaka, a private ultra-Orthodox rescue organisation, whose officials were already known to have fabricated Hamas atrocities on 7 October, including the various claims of depraved acts against babies.
No forensic evidence
Interestingly, though the main claims of Hamas rape have focused on the Nova music festival attacked by Hamas, Schwartz was initially sceptical – and for good reason – that it was the site of any sexual violence.
As Israeli reporting has revealed, the festival quickly turned into a battlefield, with Israeli security guards and Hamas exchanging gunfire and Israeli attack helicopters circling overhead firing at anything that moved.
Schwartz concluded: “Everyone I spoke to among the survivors told me about a chase, a race, like, about moving from place to place. How would they [have had the time] to mess with a woman, like – it is impossible. Either you hide, or you – or you die. Also it’s public, the Nova … such an open space.”
But Schwartz dropped her scepticism as soon as Raz Cohen, a veteran of Israel’s special forces, agreed to speak to her. He had already claimed in earlier interviews a few days after 7 October that he had witnessed multiple rapes at Nova, including corpses being raped.
But when he spoke to Schwartz he could only recall one incident – a horrific attack that involved raping a woman and then knifing her to death. Undermining the New York Times’ central claim, he attributed the rape not to Hamas but to five civilians, Palestinians who poured into Israel after Hamas fighters broke through the fence around Gaza.
Notably, Schwartz admitted to Channel 12 that none of the other four people hiding in the bush with Cohen saw the attack. “Everyone else is looking in a different direction,” she said.
And yet in the Times’ story, Cohen’s account is corroborated by Shoam Gueta, a friend who has since deployed to Gaza where, as the Intercept notes, he has been posting videos of himself rummaging through destroyed Palestinian homes.
Another witness, identified only as Sapir, is quoted by Schwartz as witnessing a woman being raped at Nova at the same time as her breast is amputated with a box cutter. That account became central to the Guardian’s follow-up report in January.
Yet, no forensic evidence has been produced to support this account.
Story invented
But the most damning criticism of the Times’ reporting came from the family of Gal Abdush, the headline victim in the “Screams without Words” story. Her parents and brother accused the New York Times of inventing the story that she had been raped at the Nova festival.
Moments before she was killed by a grenade, Abdush had messaged her family and made no mention of a rape or even a direct attack on her group. The family had heard no suggestion that rape was a factor in Abdush’s death.
A woman who had given the paper access to photos and video of Abdush taken that day said Schwartz had pressured her to do so on the grounds it would help “Israeli hasbara” – a term meaning propaganda designed to sway foreign audiences.
Schwartz cited the Israeli welfare ministry as claiming there were four survivors of sexual assault from 7 October, though no more details have been forthcoming from the ministry.
Back in early December, before the Times story, Israeli officials promised they had “gathered ‘tens of thousands’ of testimonies of sexual violence committed by Hamas”. None of those testimonies has materialised.
None ever will, according to Schwartz’s conversation with Channel 12. “There is nothing. There was no collection of evidence from the scene,” she said.
Nonetheless, Israeli officials continue to use the reports by the New York Times, the Guardian and others to try to bully major human rights bodies into agreeing that Hamas used sexual violence systematically.
Which may explain why the media eagerly seized on the chance to resurrect its threadbare narrative when UN official Pramila Patten, its special representative on sexual violence in conflict, echoed some of their discredited claims in a report published this month.
The media happily ignored the fact that Patten had no investigative mandate and that she heads what is in effect an advocacy group inside the UN. While Israel has obstructed UN bodies that do have such investigative powers, it welcomed Patten, presumably on the assumption that she would be more pliable.
In fact, she did little more than repeat the same unevidenced claims from Israel that formed the basis of the Times and Guardian’s discredited reporting.
Statements retracted
Even so, Patten included important caveats in the small print of her report that the media were keen to overlook.
At a press conference, she reiterated that she had seen no evidence of a pattern of behaviour by Hamas, or of the use of rape as a weapon of war – the very claims the Western media had been stressing for weeks.
She concluded in the report that she was unable to “establish the prevalence of sexual violence”. And further, she conceded it was not clear if any sexual violence occurring on 7 October was the responsibility of Hamas, or other groups or individuals.
All of that was ignored by the media. In typical fashion, a Guardian article on her report asserted wrongly in its headline: “UN finds ‘convincing information’ that Hamas raped and tortured Israeli hostages”.
Patten’s primary source of information, she conceded, were Israeli “national institutions” – state officials who had every incentive to mislead her in the furtherance of the country’s war aims, as they had earlier done with a compliant media.
As the US Jewish scholar Normal Finkelstein has pointed out, Patten also relied on open-source material: 5,000 photos and 50 hours of video footage from bodycams, dashcams, cellphones, CCTV and traffic surveillance cameras. And yet that visual evidence yielded not a single image of sexual violence. Or as Patten phrased it: “No tangible indications of rape could be identified.”
She admitted she had seen no forensic evidence of sexual violence, and had not met a single survivor of rape or sexual assault.
And she noted that the witnesses and sources her team spoke to – the same individuals the media had relied on – proved unreliable. They “adopted over time an increasingly cautious and circumspect approach regarding past accounts, including in some cases retracting statements made previously”.
Collusion in genocide
If anything has been found to be systematic, it is the failings in the Western media’s coverage of a plausible genocide unfolding in Gaza.
Last week a computational analysis of the New York Times’ reporting revealed it continued to focus heavily on Israeli perspectives, even as the death-toll ratio showed that 30 times as many Palestinians had been killed by Israel in Gaza than Hamas had killed Israelis on 7 October.
The paper quoted Israelis and Americans many times more regularly than they did Palestinians, and when Palestinians were referred to it was invariably in the passive voice.
In Britain, the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring has analysed nearly 177,000 clips from TV broadcasts covering the first month after the 7 October attack. It found Israeli perspectives were three times more common than Palestinian ones.
A similar study by the Glasgow Media Group found that journalists regularly used condemnatory language for the killing of Israelis – “murderous”, “mass murder”, “brutal murder” and “merciless murder” – but never when Palestinians were being killed by Israel. “Massacres”, “atrocities” and “slaughter” were only ever carried out against Israelis, not against Palestinians.
Faced with a plausible case of genocide – one being televised for months on end – even the liberal elements of the Western media have shown they have no serious commitment to the liberal democratic values they are supposedly there to uphold.
They are not a watchdog on power, either the power of the Israeli military or Western states colluding in Israel’s slaughter. Rather the media are central to making the collusion possible. They are there to disguise and whitewash it, to make it look acceptable.
Indeed, the truth is that, without that help, Israel’s allies would long ago have been shamed into action, into stopping the slaughter and starvation. The Western media’s hands are stained in Gaza’s blood.
Besides the Israeli military’s mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza (the West Bank as well), there have been repressive measures by Israel to silence the dissent of pro-Palestinian voices. In a sane world, Israel would be sanctioned and deprived of U.S. military aid. Its right-wing leaders would be charged by the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Unfortunately, the world has been insane at this time in human history.
The Israeli-Palestinian war is something unlike other wars in recent history. (Although the 2003 Iraq War is a close example.) The military actions of Israel in Gaza have ironically been, in intent, similar to Nazi Germany’s herding of Jews into the Warsaw ghetto and attempt to starve them. They haven’t yet tried to totally wipe them out because have killed over 30,000 and displaced tens of thousands more while subjecting them to humiliating and brutal living conditions for many years.
Worldwide, there have been the obvious protests against and condemnations of Israel. Voices emphasizing the need for a permanent cease-fire have been loud. But Israel, and its main accomplice, the United States, have not really been listening, or simply don’t care. There have been warnings from the Biden administration for Israel to be more careful, but the United States continues to supply Israel with weapons to use against Palestinians. Thus, Israel is merely getting a soft slap on the wrist in the face of its war crimes.
Among the voices of dissent, the Middle East Studies Association wrote a letter for Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Police Commissioner, Yaacov Shavtai and various ministers and university rectors. The letter condemned Israel’s repression against Palestinian students in Israeli universities. This is censorship run amok.
The letter begins as follows:
“We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our deep and growing concern regarding the ongoing attacks against and restrictions on Palestinian citizens of Israel who are students at Israeli institutions. We call upon you in the strongest terms to put an end to what appears to be a targeted repression of freedom of expression and uphold your responsibility to ensure academic freedom.”
The letter further states that MESA previously contacted Israel about “aggressions against Palestinian students” after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks. There is a statement that students have been the targets of intimidation and surveillance. Most importantly, MESA writes that these methods of repression have been going on since before October 7, in fact, for about seven decades. Censorship targets Palestinian students and professors for their criticism of Israel’s actions against Gaza and “their solidarity with the innocent people there.”
MESA cites a survey conducted by the Arab Student Movements Union, which represents Palestinian citizens of Israel who attend colleges and universities. The survey found that 85% of the students polled believed that their security was being threatened. Some 71% said that they are experiencing economic hardship because of the war. Because of this hardship, nearly half of the students considered dropping out of schools they attend and/or considered leaving Israel to pursue education elsewhere.
Further, the survey reveals that, after October 7, 2023, about 160 students have been disciplined for being supposed suspects supporting “terrorism.” Nineteen students have been arrested by the Israeli police because of being so-called terrorists and/or supporting a terrorist organization. But, “Typically, these students were expressing their solidarity with fellow Palestinians and with the children, women, and civilians in the Gaza Strip.”
Also, after October 7, “nine Palestinian students at the University of Haifa were suspended without a disciplinary hearing by the university’s rector, Gur Alroey, for sharing posts and stories on social media.” Alroey’s excuse was that they could cause “extreme situations” at the university. But the university reversed its position and agreed to mediation “with the students’ legal representation.”
Jewish-Israeli students, however, ignored the ruling and called for the suspension of the nine students without due process. Going further, they protested against the nine students. The National Union of Israeli Students (NUIS) kept the harassment going, launching a campaign to “eradicate the support of terrorism on campuses.” NUIS, then, did not really use its influence to help provide security for all students. As a result, Palestinians were looked at as outcasts.
In an act of paranoia, universities published guides on how to use firearms. This resulted in a rise in the carrying of guns and rifles at universities. MESA’s letter asserted that “Academic institutions are expected to ensure that the campus climate is not hostile, that public discourse remains respectful, and that all students feel safe. Guns do not belong on university campuses.”
The letter added: “We condemn the circumvention of due process, as well as the prejudicial treatment of and broad incitement against Palestinians students,” portraying all of them as terrorists.
In conclusion, “We therefore call upon you to cease these targeted attacks on the higher education sector and ensure that Israeli campuses are safe for all their students and faculty, including those calling for an end to the war.”
Journalists have also been targets of Israeli aggression, but in a more direct fashion. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gunned down journalists who have been reporting on the front lines of the war. According to Mohamed Mandour, writing for the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), “Since the Israel-Gaza war began on October 7, journalists and media across the region have faced a hostile environment that has made reporting on the war exceptionally challenging.” Mandour writes that 25 journalists have been arrested, with the use of “numerous assaults, threats, cyberattacks, and censorship.” He adds that 19 of the journalists were still in prison according to the CPJ’s records as of February 14, 2024.
Photojournalist Yasser Qudih suffered the loss of eight family members when four missiles struck their house on November 13, 2023. The CPJ got this information from Reuters and The Guardian. The odds are certain that it was an attack by the IDF. But the group HonestReporting, which monitors the news for supposed anti-Israel bias, inaccuracy and other breaches of journalistic standards, raised questions that Qudih and his family members knew of the October 7 Hamas attack beforehand. This unsubstantiated accusation was rejected and HonestReporting withdrew it the next day.
But the word was out and Netanyahu took advantage of the falsehood. His office tweeted that photographers were complicit in committing “crimes against humanity.” Despite this falsehood, “Israeli war cabinet member Benny Gantz [said] they should be treated as terrorists. Qudih survived the attack.”
Of course, other attacks occurred, no doubt spurred on by Gantz’s ridiculous claim. Other journalists were either killed or survived attacks; sometimes their family members were killed.
Mandour writes, “CPJ is investigating reports that more than 50 offices in Gaza were damaged, leaving many journalists with no safe place to do their jobs, as they also contend with extensive power and communication outages, food and water shortages, and sometimes have to flee with their families.”
The high risks are obvious as journalists cover the war. The IDF and Israeli police have been barbaric in their treatment of them as they uncover truths and facts for world consumption, contrary to Israel’s attempts to hide truths and facts with bizarre and insane propaganda.
Israel is not the only entity trying to hide the realities of the war. As of this writing, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been considering adopting what amounts to censorship rules on the subjects of Israel and the war. While it has been gathering feedback on the move, there are doubts that Meta will change its mind.
There is a manufactured controversy on the use of the word, “Zionist.” Meta may have the intent to censor the word, along with other terminology that puts Israel in a bad light. Writing forThe Intercept, Sam Biddle quotes Dani Noble, who is part of Jewish Voice for Peace:
“As an anti-Zionist Jewish organization for Palestinian freedom, we are horrified to learn that Meta is considering expanding when they treat ‘Zionism’—a political ideology—as the same as ‘Jew/Jewish’—an ethno-religious identity.” Further, Noble said that such a policy shift “will result in shielding the Israeli government from accountability for its policies and actions that violate Palestinian human rights.”
Previously, the word Zionist was allowed as long as it was not associated with the words Jew and Jewish. Now, Meta moderators can be more stringent in deciding whether Zionist is allowed or if it is used to promote anti-Semitism. Thus, Meta has a long reach in deciding which comments are allowed when posting the “offending” word.
The moderating (or censoring) of the word Zionist is par for the course for hard-line Israel supporters. While there is an attempt to equate it with anti-Semitism, it really symbolizes a religious form of ultra-nationalism, as evidenced by the right-wing Israeli government’s use of it, along with the right-wing settlers as they attempt to steal more Palestinian land. And one of the objectives on the part of Israeli fascists is to take more land to establish a “Greater Israel.” Thus, the attempt by the IDF to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, and the West Bank.
But there is a major irony here. Biddle writes, “much of the fiercest political activism against Israel’s war in Gaza has been organized by anti-Zionist Jews, while American evangelical Christian Zionists are some of Israel’s most hardcore supporters.” So, there are Jews who are not only anti-Zionist, but side with the Palestinians.
Biddle provides examples of hypothetical posts in quotes that could be censored by Meta: “Zionists are war criminals, just look at what’s happening in Gaza.” “I don’t like Zionists.” “No Zionists allowed at tonight’s meeting of the Progressive Student Association.”
Meta spokesperson Corey Chambliss tried to justify the change in his company’s rules. Biddle quotes him as saying, “We don’t allow people to attack others based on their protected characteristics, such as their nationality or religion. Enforcing this policy requires an understanding of how people use language to reference those characteristics. While the term Zionist refers to a person’s ideology, which is not a protected characteristic, it can also be used to refer to Jewish or Israeli people.”
Chambliss goes on to imply that the new rules are necessary because of tensions relating to the Middle East. But he admitted that the word Zionist is an ideology, not a religion. Besides, tensions are high already, with Israel’s military aggression in Gaza. It seems like Meta is harping on the word while there are more important things to attend to, like opposing the war, and coming to grips with about 29,000 Palestinian deaths. (And, yes, the 1,200 Israeli deaths need attention even though 55% of those killed were members of the IDF.)
Meta did contact 10 Arab, Muslim and pro-Palestinian organizations about the use of the word Zionist and how it could be used in a “dehumanizing way or violent way” if referring to Jews or Israelis, according to Guardian writers Johana Bhuiyan and Kari Paul.
But Linda Sarsour, “the executive director of Muslim advocacy organization MPower Change, said Meta’s director of content policy stakeholder engagement, Peter Stern, provided few details about why the company was revisiting the policy now and how it would be implemented or enforced in a way that doesn’t stifle political expression.” Bhuiyan and Paul quoted Sarsour’s response: “If you already have a policy that’s addressing Zionism as a proxy, then why are we having this conversation? Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”
Expanding the policy could censor those who post pro-Palestinian comments, as well as facts, in the guise of preventing anti-Semitism. Meta, however, has had a policy that allowed the word Zionist to be used as long there wasn’t an association with the words Jew and Jewish. As Sarsour asks, “Why is there further consideration to expand this policy?”
Censorship, threats, intimidation and even murder cannot stop the tidal wave of opposition worldwide to Israel’s war. In Israel itself, more people are speaking out and opposing the Netanyahu government. And events may lead to the downfall of the Israeli fascists.
Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,
“That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is emptying out those early high expectations …
“That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
“No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear, however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of traditional Sunni Islam.
“All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the horn of Africa.
[Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.
Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran (brokered by China).
“The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western oil interests.
But look what has happened —
A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within the Middle East.
What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:
“Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.
“Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation – representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?
“It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles?”
What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet) reflected in any substantive physical departure).
The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.
Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.
The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS. Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the Gulf ‘business model’.
But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran. It is easy for western Iran-hawks to decry Iran’s politicking and influencing across the region – the Islamic Republic is after all, unrepentantly ‘non-compliant’ with the U.S. aims and pro-Israeli ambitions in the Region. What else, other than pushback, might you expect when all the encircling western ‘fire’ was so concentrated on the Islamic Republic?
Yet, Iran has pursued an astute path. It has NOT gone to war against Sunni Arab states in Syria, as was mooted in 2012. Rather, it quietly has pursued a strategy of diplomacy and joint Gulf security and trade with Gulf States. Iran too, has partly succeeded in shaking itself free from much of the effects of western sanctions. It has joined both BRICS and the SCO and has acquired a new economic and political ‘spatial depth’.
Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political player, and it sits atop, with others, the coalition of Resistance Movements and Fronts that have been woven together through shrewd diplomacy to work in close conjunction with each other.
This development has become a key strategic ‘project’: Sunni (Hamas) and Shi’i (Hizbullah) are joined with other ‘fronts’ in an anti-colonial struggle for liberation under the non-sectarian symbol of Al-Aqsa (which is neither Sunni, nor Shi’a, nor Muslim Brotherhood, nor Salafist or Wahhabi). It represents, rather, the storied tale of Islamic civilisation. Yes, it is, in its way, eschatological too.
This latter achievement has done much to limit the threat of all-out war from engulfing the region (fingers-crossed though …). The Iranian and Resistance Axis’ interest is twofold: First, to retain power to carefully calibrate the intensity of conflict – upping and lowering as appropriate; and secondly, to keep escalatory dominance as much as possible in their hands.
The second aspect encompasses strategic patience. The Resistance Movements well understand the Israeli psyche – therefore, NO Pavlovian reflexes to Israeli provocations are accepted. But rather, to wait and rely on Israel to provide the pretext to any further step up the escalatory ladder. Israel must be seen to be the instigator for escalation – and the resistance merely the responder. The ‘eye’ must be on the Washington political psyche.
Thirdly, Iran draws confidence to pursue its ‘forwardness’ by having innovated a tectonic shift in asymmetric warfare, and in deterrence against Israel and the West. The U.S. might huff and puff, but Iran felt assured throughout this period that the U.S. well knows the risks associated with trying ‘blow the house down’.
Realists in the West tend to believe that ‘power’ is a simple function of national population size and GDP. So that, given the disparity in air and firepower, no way, as an example, can Hizbullah expect to ‘come out quits’ against Israel – a much richer and more populated entity.
This blindspot is the Resistance’s silent ‘ally’. It prevents the West (mostly) from understanding this pivot in military thinking.
Iran and its allies take a different view: They regard a state’s power to rest on intangibles, rather than literal tangibles: strategic patience; ideology; discipline; innovation and the concept of military leadership defined as the ability to cast a ‘magic’ spell over men so that they would follow their commander, even unto death.
The West has (or had) airpower and unchallenged air superiority, but the Resistance Fronts have their two-stage solution. They manufacture their own AI-assisted swarm drones and smart earth-hugging missiles. This is their Air Force.
The second stage naturally would be to evolve a layered air defence system (Russian-style). Does the Resistance possess such? Like Brer Rabbit, they stay mum.
The Resistance’s underlying strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in its air dominance and in its overwhelming fire-power. It prioritises quick shock and awe thrusts, but usually quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. They rarely can sustain such high-intensity assault for long.
In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air assault swept overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces were unaffected and emerged only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits. This patience represents the first pillar of strategy.
The second therefore, is that whereas the West has short endurance, the opposition is trained and prepared for long attritional conflict – missile and rocket barrage to the point that civil society can sustain the impact no longer. War’s aim not necessarily has killing the enemy soldiers as a prime objective; rather it is exhaustion and inculcating a sense of defeat.
And what of the opposing project?
In 2012, I wrote:
“It seems that both Israel and [the Islamic world] are marching in step toward [eschatological narratives] which is taking them far away from the underlying, largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of religious poles? ” [– Al-Aqsa versus the Temple Mount].
Well, the West remains stuck with trying to manage and contain the conflict, using precisely those ‘largely secular concepts’ by which this conflict has been conceptualised and managed (or non-managed, I would say). In so doing, and through the West’s (secular) support for one particular eschatological vision (which happens to overlap with its own) over another, it inadvertently fuels the conflict.
Too late to return to secular modes of management; the genie is out.
Anyone acting in good faith understands that murdering 30,000 innocent people has nothing to do with eliminating Hamas. Operation Iron Glaive appears for what it is: a cover to realize the old dream pursued by Jewish fascists from Jabotinsky to Netanyahu: to expel the Arab population from Palestine. From then on, this mass crime, committed for the first time live on television, turned the world’s political chessboard upside down. Feeling threatened, the Jewish supremacists themselves threatened the United States. Anxious to remain masters of the “free world”, the United States is preparing to topple the Jewish supremacists.
The Biden administration watched with bated breath as Israel reacted to the attack by the Palestinian Resistance, including Hamas, known as the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” (October 7). Operation Iron Glaive began with a massive pounding of Gaza City on a scale unprecedented anywhere in the world, including the World Wars. From October 27 onwards, this was followed by ground intervention, looting and the torture of thousands of Gazan civilians. In five months, 37,534 civilians were killed or disappeared, including 13,430 children and 8,900 women, 364 medical personnel and 132 journalists. [1].
At first, Washington reacted by unwaveringly supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself”, threatening to veto any ceasefire request and supplying as many bombs as necessary for the widespread destruction of the Palestinian enclave. It was unthinkable, in its eyes, to suffer yet another defeat, after those in Syria and Ukraine. However, Americans were watching the horrors live on their cell phones. Many high-ranking State Department officials wrote and spoke of their shame at supporting this butchery. Petitions were circulated. Prominent figures, both Jewish and Muslim, resigned.
In the midst of a presidential election campaign, Joe Biden’s team could no longer stain its hands with blood. It therefore began to put pressure on the Israeli war cabinet to negotiate the release of the hostages and conclude a ceasefire. However, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition refused, playing on the trauma of its citizens to ensure that peace would only return once Hamas had been eradicated. Washington eventually realized that the events of October 7 were merely a pretext for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted to do: expel the Arabs from Palestine. He became more insistent, stressing that the Palestinians had a right to live, that the colonization of their land was illegal under international law, and that the Israeli-Palestinian question would be resolved by a “two-state solution” (and not by the binational state envisaged by Resolution 181 of 1947).
Revisionist Zionists” (i.e., followers of Jabotinsky [2]) responded by organizing the “Conference for the Victory of Israel” [3] on January 28, 2024. Headlining the event was Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf, sentenced in Israel to life imprisonment for his racist crimes against Arabs, but pardoned by his friends. Sharbaf did not hesitate to proclaim himself heir to the Lehi and Stern groups who fought against the Allies alongside duce Benito Mussolini.
The message was perfectly received in Washington and London: this tiny group intended to impose its will on the Anglo-Saxons and would not hesitate to attack them if they tried to prevent ethnic cleansing.
The White House immediately issued a ban on fundraising and transfers to them [4]. This ban was extended to all Western banks under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
In addition, on February 8, President Joe Biden signed a Memorandum on the conditions of US arms transfers [5]. Israel has until March 25 to guarantee in writing that it will not violate either International Humanitarian Law (but not International Law itself) or Human Rights (in the sense of the US Constitution).
For their part, the parliaments of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have begun debating the possibility of ceasing arms trading with Israel.
In Israel, the Jewish democratic opposition organized anti-Zionist demonstrations, which were not very well attended. Speakers emphasized the betrayal of the Prime Minister, who used the shock of October 7 not to save the hostages, but to realize his colonial dream.
The “revisionist Zionists” then launched a media offensive against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Since 1949, this UN agency has been providing education, food, healthcare and social services to 5.8 million stateless Palestinians in Palestine itself, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It has an annual budget of over $1 billion and employs over 30,000 people. Already in 2018, President Donald Trump had questioned the agency’s assistance to Palestinians and suspended US funding for it. His intention was to force the Palestinian factions back to the negotiating table. Five years on, the aim of the “revisionist Zionists” is very different. By attacking UNRWA, they intend to force Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to expel Palestinian refugees too. To this end, they accused 0.04% of its staff of having taken part in Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa, and blocked their bank accounts in Israel. UNRWA Director Philippe Lazzarini of Switzerland immediately suspended the 12 accused employees and ordered an internal investigation.
Of course, he never received the proof the Israelis claimed to have, but one donor after another, led by the United States and the European Union, suspended funding. Within days in Gaza, and weeks in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, the United Nations aid system collapsed.
As David Cameron, former British Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary, visited Israel to discuss how to salvage what was left for the Palestinians, Amichai Chikli, Minister of the Diaspora, compared him to Neville Chamberlain signing the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. “Hello to David Cameron, who wants to bring ’Peace to Our Time’ and give the Nazis, who committed the atrocities of October 7, a prize in the form of a Palestinian state as a sign of gratitude for the murder of babies in their cradles, the mass rapes and the abduction of mothers with their children,” he declared. As at the “Israel Victory Conference”, the “revisionist Zionists” threatened the Anglo-Saxons.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish supremacist coalition began to talk of a new phase of “Swords of Iron”, this time against Rafah. Civilians, who had already fled Gaza, would have to flee again. However, since Tshal had built a road cutting the Gaza Strip in two, they would not be able to return to where they had come from. Preparing for the worst, Egypt set up a vast area of Sinai to temporarily house Gazans whose expulsion seemed inevitable [6].
Aware that they could only hold on to power in Tel Aviv thanks to the shock of October 7, the “revisionist Zionists” passed a law equating any reflection on the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” operation with a challenge to the Nazi Final Solution. It forbade any investigation into these events, on pain of 5 years’ imprisonment. Revisionists could therefore continue to attribute the attack solely to Hamas, even though Islamic Jihad and the PFLP had taken part. They could interpret it as an anti-Semitic demonstration, equating it with a gigantic pogrom and thus denying its objective of national liberation.
Knowing that many states were questioning their withdrawal from UNRWA funding, the revisionist Zionists continued their attacks on the agency. They claimed that Hamas headquarters was located in a tunnel beneath the agency’s headquarters. Philippe Lazzarini expressed his perplexity and recalled that Israel regularly came to search the agency’s facilities. But Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, tweeted: “It’s not that you don’t know, it’s that you don’t want to know. We have shown the terrorists tunnels under UNRWA schools and provided evidence that Hamas is exploiting UNRWA. We implored you to carry out a comprehensive search of all UNRWA facilities in Gaza. But not only did you refuse, you chose to bury your head in the sand. Assume your responsibilities and resign today. Every day, we find more proof that in Gaza, Hamas=the UN and vice-versa. You can’t trust everything the UN says, or everything they say about Gaza.
The Jewish supremacists formed an organization, Tzav 9 (by analogy with the general mobilization order “Tsav 8”) to prevent UNRWA from continuing its aid to the Gazans. They stationed activists at the two entry points to the Gaza Strip to obstruct the passage of trucks. At the same time, an UNRWA truck driver was murdered in Gaza, forcing the agency to suspend its convoys. The convoys were eventually resumed, but only under Israeli military escort. It was at this point that the first attacks by starving crowds took place. USAID Director Samantha Power announced that she would be visiting the area to verify what was happening. Washington assumed that the attacks were not spontaneous, but encouraged by “revisionist Zionists”. Only then did the massacre take place at the Naboulsi traffic circle (south of Gaza City): according to the IDF, 112 people were trampled to death during a food aid distribution. The Israeli soldiers only managed to extricate themselves by using their weapons. In reality, according to the medical staff and the United Church of Christ, 95% of the victims were killed by bullets. Washington issued a statement supporting Tel Aviv’s position, but according to Haaretz: “It is doubtful that the international community will buy these explanations” [7].
Washington responded by authorizing Jordan and France to drop food rations on Gaza’s beaches, and then by joining in these air operations. In addition, they began deploying their logistics to create a floating island that could serve as a landing stage for international humanitarian aid to Gaza (the Gazan coast is too shallow to accommodate large ships). In doing so, the Pentagon is taking up an idea put forward in 2017 by Israel Katz, current Minister of Foreign Affairs. The principle of a humanitarian naval corridor from Cyprus has already been agreed. It will be used by the United Arab Emirates and the European Union
While Israel accused, still without proof, now 450 UNRWA employees of being members of Hamas, UNRWA met and listened to a hundred Gazan civilians who had been taken prisoner by the IDF “for interrogation”. It is preparing a report on the systematic torture they underwent. The whole world has seen the images of these men forced by Israeli soldiers to strip naked for interrogation. Scorning the Anglo-Saxons, the “revisionist Zionists” resumed their colonization project. They entered the Gaza Strip, through the Eretz/Beit Hanoune crossing, to construct the first buildings of a new settlement, New Nisanit. They were able to erect two wooden buildings before being turned back by the IDF.
36 editors from leading Anglo-Saxon media signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists denouncing the deaths of their employees in Gaza and reminding the Israeli government of its responsibility to ensure their safety [8].
However, while the Israeli government pretended to be surprised by these deaths, most of the Department of Information officers tendered their resignations en bloc. Minister Galit Distel-Etebaryan had already resigned on October 12 to protest against military censorship. Now the crisis was much more serious: those responsible for disinformation refused to continue lying, as the gap between their narrative and the truth continued to widen.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s only concession was to lift the ban on Ramadan celebrations at the Al-Aqsa mosque. After Arab deputies in the Knesset intervened with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who was solely responsible for the security of Jerusalem’s Muslim holy site, he finally authorized these gatherings for the first week, renewable every seven days.
Washington then decided to radically change its policy. Until then, it had considered that it could not afford to let Israel lose. It had therefore supported its crime. Now, it could no longer afford to let the Jewish fascists win. It’s important to understand that Washington didn’t change its mind when it saw the suffering of the Gazans, nor because of a sudden outburst of anti-fascism, but because of the threats of the “revisionist Zionists”. Its positions are dictated exclusively by its desire to maintain its domination of the world. It could not contemplate another defeat for its Israeli allies, this time after those in Syria and Ukraine. But it could even less envisage losing to the “revisionist Zionists”.
The Biden Administration has therefore invited General Benny Gantz, the former alternative Prime Minister and since October 12 Minister without Portfolio, to consult in the United States, despite the opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a kind of backlash to the way the latter was invited to deliver a speech before Congress against the advice of President Barack Obama, in 2015. The United States is keen to show that it is in charge and no one else.
The United States feels compelled to act. Russia has invited sixty Palestinian political organizations to Moscow. It urged them to unite and convinced Hamas to accept the PLO charter, i.e. to recognize the State of Israel.
General Benny Gantz did not accept this invitation to seek outside help and overthrow the Prime Minister. He went to Washington to make sure that he could still save Israel and that his allies would not let him down. To their great surprise, he did not appear to them as a strategic alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu, but just as a general concerned not to massacre innocent people en masse.
On March 5, Benny Gantz was received by Vice President Kamala Harris, who delivered an uncompromising denunciation of the massacre perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The US press pointed out that her initial speech had been written in even harsher terms. The important thing is that she played the role of “bad cop”, while the State Department and Pentagon played the more understanding “good cop”. He also met the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who thus anointed him in the name of “America” as Israel’s future Prime Minister. While there, he learned of the immediate retirement of Under-Secretary Victoria Nuland.
She is known in Europe for having overseen the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. She was also responsible for convincing German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande to sign the Minsk agreements in order to secure Russia’s withdrawal. We now know that the West had no intention of stopping the massacre of the Donbass inhabitants, but only of buying time to arm Ukraine.
However, Victoria Nuland is first and foremost the wife of historian Robert Kagan, who presided over the Project for a New American Century. It was in this capacity that they announced the September 11th attacks, the “New Pearl Harbor” that would reawaken the “American Empire” [9]. Both are disciples of the philosopher Leo Strauss, himself a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky and a leading figure in the neoconservative movement [10]. The number 2 at the Project for a New American Century was Elliott Abrams, the man who last year financed Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign and coup d’état [11].
In 2006, Victoria Nuland, then US ambassador to NATO, stopped the Israeli-Lebanese war, saving Israel from defeat at the hands of Hezbollah. She therefore knows Benjamin Netanyahu very well. Her dismissal demonstrates the Biden Administration’s desire to clean up its own house, while doing the same for Israel.
On March 6, Benny Gantz stopped off in London on his way home. He was received by Security Adviser Tim Barrow, Prime Minister Rishi Suna and Foreign Secretary David Cameron. He stressed that Israel had the right to defend itself, but only in accordance with international law. For him, this was an obligatory stop, since Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political secret society run by the British MI6 and followed for decades by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales).
During his State of the Union address on March 7, President Joe Biden said, “To Israel’s leaders, I say this: Humanitarian aid cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives must be a priority. As for the future, the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution. I say this as a long-time ally of Israel, and as the only American president to have visited Israel in wartime. But there is no other way to guarantee Israel’s security and democracy. There is no other way to guarantee the Palestinians a life of peace and dignity. And there is no other way that guarantees peace between Israel and all its Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia” [12].
During the Gazan massacre, many leaders in the wider Middle East who were sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood began to question Hamas. If it was understandable that, supposedly in the name of Islam, the Brotherhood had fought the Soviets, then the secularists Muamar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, how could it be explained that they had carried out an operation for which only a Muslim people would pay the price? First to react, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revoked the Turkish citizenship of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, the Egyptian Mahmud Huseyin, which he had granted him two years earlier.
This does not, of course, mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is abandoning the ideology of political Islam, but that he is attempting to dissociate it from Anglo-Saxon colonialism, as proposed by Brother Mahmoud Fathi.
For 75 years, the West has imposed its will on its former colonies in the “wider Middle East”, either through jihadists or directly through its armies. By supporting for four months the massacres perpetrated by the Jewish fascists of the Jabotinsky-Netanyahu group, the West has lost its prestige. Whatever Israel does next, with Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid rather than Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s power, based on the myth that Jews are incompatible with fascism, has collapsed. From now on, it will be possible to exhume all the crimes committed by this tiny group, on behalf of the CIA, during the Cold War, in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
“The two irreducible enemies: democrat Benny Gantz and fascist Benjamin Netanyahu”
The Biden administration watched with bated breath as Israel reacted to the attack by the Palestinian Resistance, including Hamas, known as the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” (October 7). Operation Iron Glaive began with a massive pounding of Gaza City on a scale unprecedented anywhere in the world, including the World Wars. From October 27 onwards, this was followed by ground intervention, looting and the torture of thousands of Gazan civilians. In five months, 37,534 civilians were killed or disappeared, including 13,430 children and 8,900 women, 364 medical personnel and 132 journalists. [1].
At first, Washington reacted by unwaveringly supporting “Israel’s right to defend itself”, threatening to veto any ceasefire request and supplying as many bombs as necessary for the widespread destruction of the Palestinian enclave. It was unthinkable, in its eyes, to suffer yet another defeat, after those in Syria and Ukraine. However, Americans were watching the horrors live on their cell phones. Many high-ranking State Department officials wrote and spoke of their shame at supporting this butchery. Petitions were circulated. Prominent figures, both Jewish and Muslim, resigned.
In the midst of a presidential election campaign, Joe Biden’s team could no longer stain its hands with blood. It therefore began to put pressure on the Israeli war cabinet to negotiate the release of the hostages and conclude a ceasefire. However, Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition refused, playing on the trauma of its citizens to ensure that peace would only return once Hamas had been eradicated. Washington eventually realized that the events of October 7 were merely a pretext for Jabotinsky’s followers to do what they had always wanted to do: expel the Arabs from Palestine. He became more insistent, stressing that the Palestinians had a right to live, that the colonization of their land was illegal under international law, and that the Israeli-Palestinian question would be resolved by a “two-state solution” (and not by the binational state envisaged by Resolution 181 of 1947).
Revisionist Zionists” (i.e., followers of Jabotinsky [2]) responded by organizing the “Conference for the Victory of Israel” [3] on January 28, 2024. Headlining the event was Rabbi Uzi Sharbaf, sentenced in Israel to life imprisonment for his racist crimes against Arabs, but pardoned by his friends. Sharbaf did not hesitate to proclaim himself heir to the Lehi and Stern groups who fought against the Allies alongside duce Benito Mussolini.
The message was perfectly received in Washington and London: this tiny group intended to impose its will on the Anglo-Saxons and would not hesitate to attack them if they tried to prevent ethnic cleansing.
The White House immediately issued a ban on fundraising and transfers to them [4]. This ban was extended to all Western banks under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA).
In addition, on February 8, President Joe Biden signed a Memorandum on the conditions of US arms transfers [5]. Israel has until March 25 to guarantee in writing that it will not violate either International Humanitarian Law (but not International Law itself) or Human Rights (in the sense of the US Constitution).
For their part, the parliaments of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have begun debating the possibility of ceasing arms trading with Israel.
In Israel, the Jewish democratic opposition organized anti-Zionist demonstrations, which were not very well attended. Speakers emphasized the betrayal of the Prime Minister, who used the shock of October 7 not to save the hostages, but to realize his colonial dream.
The “revisionist Zionists” then launched a media offensive against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Since 1949, this UN agency has been providing education, food, healthcare and social services to 5.8 million stateless Palestinians in Palestine itself, as well as in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. It has an annual budget of over $1 billion and employs over 30,000 people. Already in 2018, President Donald Trump had questioned the agency’s assistance to Palestinians and suspended US funding for it. His intention was to force the Palestinian factions back to the negotiating table. Five years on, the aim of the “revisionist Zionists” is very different. By attacking UNRWA, they intend to force Jordan, Lebanon and Syria to expel Palestinian refugees too. To this end, they accused 0.04% of its staff of having taken part in Operation Flood of Al-Aqsa, and blocked their bank accounts in Israel. UNRWA Director Philippe Lazzarini of Switzerland immediately suspended the 12 accused employees and ordered an internal investigation.
Of course, he never received the proof the Israelis claimed to have, but one donor after another, led by the United States and the European Union, suspended funding. Within days in Gaza, and weeks in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, the United Nations aid system collapsed.
As David Cameron, former British Prime Minister and current Foreign Secretary, visited Israel to discuss how to salvage what was left for the Palestinians, Amichai Chikli, Minister of the Diaspora, compared him to Neville Chamberlain signing the Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler. “Hello to David Cameron, who wants to bring ’Peace to Our Time’ and give the Nazis, who committed the atrocities of October 7, a prize in the form of a Palestinian state as a sign of gratitude for the murder of babies in their cradles, the mass rapes and the abduction of mothers with their children,” he declared. As at the “Israel Victory Conference”, the “revisionist Zionists” threatened the Anglo-Saxons.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish supremacist coalition began to talk of a new phase of “Swords of Iron”, this time against Rafah. Civilians, who had already fled Gaza, would have to flee again. However, since Tshal had built a road cutting the Gaza Strip in two, they would not be able to return to where they had come from. Preparing for the worst, Egypt set up a vast area of Sinai to temporarily house Gazans whose expulsion seemed inevitable [6].
Aware that they could only hold on to power in Tel Aviv thanks to the shock of October 7, the “revisionist Zionists” passed a law equating any reflection on the “Flood of Al-Aqsa” operation with a challenge to the Nazi Final Solution. It forbade any investigation into these events, on pain of 5 years’ imprisonment. Revisionists could therefore continue to attribute the attack solely to Hamas, even though Islamic Jihad and the PFLP had taken part. They could interpret it as an anti-Semitic demonstration, equating it with a gigantic pogrom and thus denying its objective of national liberation.
Knowing that many states were questioning their withdrawal from UNRWA funding, the revisionist Zionists continued their attacks on the agency. They claimed that Hamas headquarters was located in a tunnel beneath the agency’s headquarters. Philippe Lazzarini expressed his perplexity and recalled that Israel regularly came to search the agency’s facilities. But Gilad Erdan, Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, tweeted: “It’s not that you don’t know, it’s that you don’t want to know. We have shown the terrorists tunnels under UNRWA schools and provided evidence that Hamas is exploiting UNRWA. We implored you to carry out a comprehensive search of all UNRWA facilities in Gaza. But not only did you refuse, you chose to bury your head in the sand. Assume your responsibilities and resign today. Every day, we find more proof that in Gaza, Hamas=the UN and vice-versa. You can’t trust everything the UN says, or everything they say about Gaza.
The Jewish supremacists formed an organization, Tzav 9 (by analogy with the general mobilization order “Tsav 8”) to prevent UNRWA from continuing its aid to the Gazans. They stationed activists at the two entry points to the Gaza Strip to obstruct the passage of trucks. At the same time, an UNRWA truck driver was murdered in Gaza, forcing the agency to suspend its convoys. The convoys were eventually resumed, but only under Israeli military escort. It was at this point that the first attacks by starving crowds took place. USAID Director Samantha Power announced that she would be visiting the area to verify what was happening. Washington assumed that the attacks were not spontaneous, but encouraged by “revisionist Zionists”. Only then did the massacre take place at the Naboulsi traffic circle (south of Gaza City): according to the IDF, 112 people were trampled to death during a food aid distribution. The Israeli soldiers only managed to extricate themselves by using their weapons. In reality, according to the medical staff and the United Church of Christ, 95% of the victims were killed by bullets. Washington issued a statement supporting Tel Aviv’s position, but according to Haaretz: “It is doubtful that the international community will buy these explanations” [7]
.
Washington responded by authorizing Jordan and France to drop food rations on Gaza’s beaches, and then by joining in these air operations. In addition, they began deploying their logistics to create a floating island that could serve as a landing stage for international humanitarian aid to Gaza (the Gazan coast is too shallow to accommodate large ships). In doing so, the Pentagon is taking up an idea put forward in 2017 by Israel Katz, current Minister of Foreign Affairs. The principle of a humanitarian naval corridor from Cyprus has already been agreed. It will be used by the United Arab Emirates and the European Union
While Israel accused, still without proof, now 450 UNRWA employees of being members of Hamas, UNRWA met and listened to a hundred Gazan civilians who had been taken prisoner by the IDF “for interrogation”. It is preparing a report on the systematic torture they underwent. The whole world has seen the images of these men forced by Israeli soldiers to strip naked for interrogation. Scorning the Anglo-Saxons, the “revisionist Zionists” resumed their colonization project. They entered the Gaza Strip, through the Eretz/Beit Hanoune crossing, to construct the first buildings of a new settlement, New Nisanit. They were able to erect two wooden buildings before being turned back by the IDF.
36 editors from leading Anglo-Saxon media signed a letter from the Committee to Protect Journalists denouncing the deaths of their employees in Gaza and reminding the Israeli government of its responsibility to ensure their safety [8].
However, while the Israeli government pretended to be surprised by these deaths, most of the Department of Information officers tendered their resignations en bloc. Minister Galit Distel-Etebaryan had already resigned on October 12 to protest against military censorship. Now the crisis was much more serious: those responsible for disinformation refused to continue lying, as the gap between their narrative and the truth continued to widen.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s only concession was to lift the ban on Ramadan celebrations at the Al-Aqsa mosque. After Arab deputies in the Knesset intervened with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who was solely responsible for the security of Jerusalem’s Muslim holy site, he finally authorized these gatherings for the first week, renewable every seven days.
Washington then decided to radically change its policy. Until then, it had considered that it could not afford to let Israel lose. It had therefore supported its crime. Now, it could no longer afford to let the Jewish fascists win. It’s important to understand that Washington didn’t change its mind when it saw the suffering of the Gazans, nor because of a sudden outburst of anti-fascism, but because of the threats of the “revisionist Zionists”. Its positions are dictated exclusively by its desire to maintain its domination of the world. It could not contemplate another defeat for its Israeli allies, this time after those in Syria and Ukraine. But it could even less envisage losing to the “revisionist Zionists”.
The Biden Administration has therefore invited General Benny Gantz, the former alternative Prime Minister and since October 12 Minister without Portfolio, to consult in the United States, despite the opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s a kind of backlash to the way the latter was invited to deliver a speech before Congress against the advice of President Barack Obama, in 2015. The United States is keen to show that it is in charge and no one else.
The United States feels compelled to act. Russia has invited sixty Palestinian political organizations to Moscow. It urged them to unite and convinced Hamas to accept the PLO charter, i.e. to recognize the State of Israel.
General Benny Gantz did not accept this invitation to seek outside help and overthrow the Prime Minister. He went to Washington to make sure that he could still save Israel and that his allies would not let him down. To their great surprise, he did not appear to them as a strategic alternative to Benjamin Netanyahu, but just as a general concerned not to massacre innocent people en masse.
On March 5, Benny Gantz was received by Vice President Kamala Harris, who delivered an uncompromising denunciation of the massacre perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition. The US press pointed out that her initial speech had been written in even harsher terms. The important thing is that she played the role of “bad cop”, while the State Department and Pentagon played the more understanding “good cop”. He also met the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, who thus anointed him in the name of “America” as Israel’s future Prime Minister. While there, he learned of the immediate retirement of Under-Secretary Victoria Nuland.
She is known in Europe for having overseen the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. She was also responsible for convincing German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Hollande to sign the Minsk agreements in order to secure Russia’s withdrawal. We now know that the West had no intention of stopping the massacre of the Donbass inhabitants, but only of buying time to arm Ukraine.
However, Victoria Nuland is first and foremost the wife of historian Robert Kagan, who presided over the Project for a New American Century. It was in this capacity that they announced the September 11th attacks, the “New Pearl Harbor” that would reawaken the “American Empire” [9]. Both are disciples of the philosopher Leo Strauss, himself a disciple of Vladimir Jabotinsky and a leading figure in the neoconservative movement [10]. The number 2 at the Project for a New American Century was Elliott Abrams, the man who last year financed Benjamin Netanyahu’s election campaign and coup d’état [11].
In 2006, Victoria Nuland, then US ambassador to NATO, stopped the Israeli-Lebanese war, saving Israel from defeat at the hands of Hezbollah. She therefore knows Benjamin Netanyahu very well. Her dismissal demonstrates the Biden Administration’s desire to clean up its own house, while doing the same for Israel.
On March 6, Benny Gantz stopped off in London on his way home. He was received by Security Adviser Tim Barrow, Prime Minister Rishi Suna and Foreign Secretary David Cameron. He stressed that Israel had the right to defend itself, but only in accordance with international law. For him, this was an obligatory stop, since Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, a political secret society run by the British MI6 and followed for decades by King Charles III (then Prince of Wales).
During his State of the Union address on March 7, President Joe Biden said, “To Israel’s leaders, I say this: Humanitarian aid cannot be a secondary consideration or a bargaining chip. Protecting and saving innocent lives must be a priority. As for the future, the only real solution to the situation is a two-state solution. I say this as a long-time ally of Israel, and as the only American president to have visited Israel in wartime. But there is no other way to guarantee Israel’s security and democracy. There is no other way to guarantee the Palestinians a life of peace and dignity. And there is no other way that guarantees peace between Israel and all its Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia” [12].
During the Gazan massacre, many leaders in the wider Middle East who were sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood began to question Hamas. If it was understandable that, supposedly in the name of Islam, the Brotherhood had fought the Soviets, then the secularists Muamar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad, how could it be explained that they had carried out an operation for which only a Muslim people would pay the price? First to react, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan revoked the Turkish citizenship of the Brotherhood’s Supreme Guide, the Egyptian Mahmud Huseyin, which he had granted him two years earlier.
This does not, of course, mean that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is abandoning the ideology of political Islam, but that he is attempting to dissociate it from Anglo-Saxon colonialism, as proposed by Brother Mahmoud Fathi.
For 75 years, the West has imposed its will on its former colonies in the “wider Middle East”, either through jihadists or directly through its armies. By supporting for four months the massacres perpetrated by the Jewish fascists of the Jabotinsky-Netanyahu group, the West has lost its prestige. Whatever Israel does next, with Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid rather than Benjamin Netanyahu and Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s power, based on the myth that Jews are incompatible with fascism, has collapsed. From now on, it will be possible to exhume all the crimes committed by this tiny group, on behalf of the CIA, during the Cold War, in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America.
The US government claims that TikTok is a national security threat because China can collect data on its users for “intelligence gathering.” Give me a break! The House of Representatives passed a bill to ban TikTok unless Byte Dance, the Chinese parent company “divests” from the app within six months or so, in other words, they are forcing Byte Dance to sell TikTok within a certain time period in order for it to operate in the US. Former Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he is putting together an investor group to supposedly buy TikTok.
The reality is that they are not going after TikTok because of China’s “intelligence gathering” on US citizens, it is because Western governments, Israel and their mainstream media networks are being exposed for their lies and propaganda more than ever before by various alternative media websites, blogs, social media, and video-sharing platforms such as TikTok.
China’s “Intelligence Gathering” vs. Israel’s War Crimes
It is most likely that the US congress is scapegoating China mainly to protect Israel’s reputation in the last bastion of its supporters in the United States were there are more than 170 million TikTok users. In one way or another Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and beyond has been exposed on TikTok and it does not look good for the self-described “Jewish State.”
Last January, the US-based TIME magazine reported on the reality of how the world views Israel and its actions in the Middle East, “New data shared with TIME magazine business intelligence company Morning Consult shows that support for Israel around the world has dropped significantly since the war in Gaza began.” Morning Consult found that Israel’s standing in world opinion has dropped dramatically, “Net favorability—the percentage of people viewing Israel positively after subtracting the percentage viewing it negatively—dropped globally by an average of 18.5 percentage points between September and December, decreasing in 42 out of the 43 countries polled.”
From China to South Korea, even in the UK and several countries in Latin America all had a somewhat positive view of Israel, but when the war on Gaza began, opinion polls on Israel’s favorability status collapsed:
China, South Africa, Brazil, and several other countries in Latin America all went from viewing Israel positively to negatively. And many rich countries that already had net negative views of Israel—including Japan, South Korea, and the U.K.—saw steep declines. Net favorability in Japan went from -39.9 to -62.0; in South Korea from-5.5 to -47.8; and in the U.K. from -17.1 to -29.8
Sonnet Frisbie, the deputy head of political intelligence at Morning Consult said that “the data shows just how tough of a road Israel has right now in the international community.” Of course, the US population still holds a favorable opinion of Israel, “The U.S. remains the only rich country that still had net positive views of Israel. Net favorability dropped just 2.2 percentage points, from a net favorability of 18.2 to a net favorability of 16 from September to December” the report said.
Al Jazeera, ‘Israel has lost the war of public opinion,’ by Imam Omar Suleiman published last year said that “In a new media landscape dominated not by Western media giants but by Instagram reels, TikTok videos and YouTube shorts, Israel’s ongoing war on the besieged Gaza Strip is more than televised.”
Israel’s crimes have been exposed due to the internet including alternative media networks and various social media platforms since the Zionist controlled mainstream media failed to do its job which should not be a surprise to anyone.
Platforms such as TikTok has more than 170 million users in the US which is a concern for both the US and Israeli governments who propagandize the US population on a daily basis on the situation of Palestine through their control of the mainstream media and Hollywood:
Audiences across the world, and especially young people, have been watching the devastation caused by Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment of the Palestinian enclave on their preferred social media platforms, in real-time, for over a month. Anyone with internet access has seen countless videos of babies torn apart by bombs, women crushed under tonnes of concrete and mothers cradling the dead bodies of their children
Suleiman said that “Israel, of course, still continues with its usual efforts – and more – to control the narrative about its bloody wars and decades-old occupation.” He pinpoints how Israel is losing the information war:
Yet, despite all these efforts, thanks largely to social media, Israel is no longer able to conceal the truth about its conduct in Palestine. It can no longer control the narratives and the public opinion on Palestine. As mainstream media loses its ability to single-handedly decide what Western and, to a certain extent, global audiences get to witness about the situation in Palestine, the brutality of Israel’s occupation has been laid out in the open for everyone to see
The Times of Israel published an article based on Israel’s obvious concerns regarding TikTok, ‘Major US Jewish group backs bipartisan bill that could see TikTok banned’ said that “One of the most prominent Jewish groups in the country has thrown its support behind a fast-advancing bill that could lead to the massively popular video app TikTok being banned in the United States.”
The world knows that both Democrats and Republicans in the US Capital are in the pockets of Jewish lobbying groups are moving forward in efforts to ban TikTok because its a “Chinese owned app” and it is collecting data on American citizens.
In my opinion, why would China spy on US citizens since most people in the US are in debt or are too busy watching reality TV, celebrity news or sports, in fact, many could not even find China or any other Asian country on a map. It’s a harsh statement, but it’s a fact. Besides there are companies(some are based in the US including Amazon) who have been selling your data for some time now. It’s no secret.
The article states that “Politicians backing the bill, who include leaders from both parties, have centered their criticism of TikTok on national security concerns related to the app’s Chinese ownership and data collection practices.” Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican from Washington said that “It is very important that it is targeted and specific to the national security threat” and that “This is not related to content. This is about the threat because of the data that has been collected.” So, the ban on TikTok is not related to the content? That’s pure nonsense. The Times of Israel at least stated the facts on why the US and Israel is really interested in banning the platform:
Jewish Federations of North America, representing hundreds of organized Jewish communities, said its support for the bill is rooted in concerns about antisemitism on the platform. The Jewish Federations and the Anti-Defamation League have accused TikTok of allowing antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment to run rampant
The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) wrote a letter to the US Congress claiming that “The single most important issue to our Jewish communities today is the dramatic rise in antisemitism” and that “Our community understands that social media is a major driver of the drive-in antisemitism and that TikTok is the worst offender by far.”
Banning TikTok is about censorship. It is a fact that Israel’s war crimes and the destructive nature of the US war machine is getting exposed more than ever before. US lawmakers are giving Byte Dance which is managed by Shou Zi Chew, a Singaporean citizen, about six months to divest US assets from the app, or they will face a ban. If the ban of TikTok moves forward, then free speech in the US is completely dead. But that does not mean all social media platforms or even websites will be in danger for the foreseeable future because there will be other apps and platforms that the US, EU, and Israeli political establishment won’t be able to control.
Banning TikTok will Only Motivate Us to Create Other Platforms
Social Media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (although owned by Elon Musk) have been completely hijacked by the government censorship regime. The Western political establishment, Globalist bankers, Zionists, Multi-national corporations such as Big Oil and Big Pharma and others around the world are facing an information war that they are clearly losing.
The internet has given us the tools to fight the mainstream media and their lies. Several social media platforms have grown to be a vital tool to challenge government and corporate propaganda such as TikTok, but there are also other various types of online-video platforms such as Rumble, Bit Chute, Odysee(part of LBRY, a blockchain based file-sharing and payment network) and we must include instant messaging services such as Telegram and VKwhere you can post articles and videos as well.
The point here is that regardless of how certain governments such as the US and the European Union who have banned foreign media companies such as Russia’s RT News and Iran’s Press TV, they also have plans to ban social media platforms, but it won’t work.
They believe that banning TikTok will prevent people from getting the truth especially to what is happening in Palestine, but they are wrong, it will only help motivate people to create new platforms and other ideas, they will create new channels of information that would get out to the public. Whether they ban TikTok or not, the genie is out of the bottle, the truth can never be suppressed.
The American empire — which is now the largest empire in history — is ending not only with defeats on every front, but with the historically profound stigma of being one of the two perpetrators (the other and more-publicized one being Israel) of the largest ethnic-cleansing operation (to remove all of the 2.3 million Gazans from Gaza) ever since Hitler’s ethnic-cleansing campaign ended.
That one ended after the Soviet Union defeated the Third Reich (or 3rd German empire) at the battle of Kursk on 23 August 1943 and so made inevitable the defeat of Hitler, and the end of his Third Reich, and the end of their organized extermination program against Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘non-Aryans’ — as well as made inevitable, from that date forward, the ultimate defeat of the Japanese empire, which (from that date forward) was only a matter of when, and no longer of whether, Japan would surrender.
The atomic bombings in August 1945 didn’t determine that victory over Japan; Hitler’s defeat at Kursk in August 1943 did. But, of course, the U.S. regime and its colonies allege that the U.S. and UK defeated Germany, though only Soviet troops entered Berlin and drove Hitler to commit suicide on 30 April 1945, thus conquering Germany. Because FDR had died just 18 days prior to that, and his successor Truman was an unknown and Stalin wanted his relations with Truman to be like his relations with FDR had been — mutually beneficial — Stalin generously allowed U.S., UK, and French, forces in as-if they all had done it, defeated Germany, so as to continue the anti-nazi alliance into the post-WW2 era. That turned out to have been a catastrophic error on Stalin’s part, simply a gamble that turned out to have been wrong.
The war in Ukraine culminates the U.S. regime’s plan ever since Russia ended the Cold War on its side in 1991 while America secretly continued its side of that war by expanding NATO right up to Russia’s borders, and especially into Ukraine itself because Ukraine is closer to The Kremlin than any other country is, barely 300 miles away, ideal for a blitz five-minute U.S. missile decapitation of Russia’s central command.
The U.S. regime started privately telling its stooges, first West Germany’s Helmut Kohl on 24 February 1990, but then later Francois Mitterrand and others, that though the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact mirror to America’s anti-Russian NATO military alliance — and the entire Russian side of the Cold War — all would soon end, the Cold War would secretly continue on the U.S.-and-allied side, until Russia itself will be conquered. Consequently, starting on 24 February 1990, America’s stooge regimes began to understand that though the prior excuse for the Cold War on America’s side was ‘anti-communism’, the reality was and is that on the American side, that war’s objective is — by whatever means (subversion, coup, proxy war, sanctions, or otherwise) — to win control over the entire world, and that Russia is America’s main target to grab control over, so as to culminate its empire.
Under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Presidency until his death on 12 April 1945 just before WW2 ended, there was no Cold War, despite some U.S. officials, such as J. Edgar Hoover, who wanted it. President Roosevelt had no qualms about accepting the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as an ally so long as both countries would be committed to defeating Hitler: for FDR, no country has any right to interfere in any other country’s domestic affairs; and, so, the Soviet Union’s domestic affairs were irrelevant to U.S.-Soviet relations. U.S. Senator Harry Truman disagreed with FDR about that; and In 1944, the Democratic Party’s megadonors required President Roosevelt to accept Truman as his running-mate for Vice President. That decision by the Democratic Party’s megadonors produced the Cold War when President Truman, upon the advice from both his personal hero General Dwight Eisenhower and Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill, decided on 25 July 1945 that America must conquer — no longer cooperate with — the Soviet Union. Within just two years, FDR’s entire Cabinet was replaced. Truman was the ultimate anti-FDR.
Today’s America is the one that Truman and his hero Eisenhower created, not the one that FDR had carefully started to plan in August 1941 until he died on 12 April 1945. Truman reversed FDR’s foreign policies. In order to understand how this happened, the reality of WW2 has to be truthfully understood.
The most masterful summary of how WW2 ended is the 12 May 2015 article by Ronnie Kasrils, his “Op-Ed: Lest we forget the truth about World War Two”, which is 100% truthful and covers all of the historically important points, so that the reader can understand how much the U.S. regime and its post-WW2 colonies (or ‘allies’) lie about that history in order to ‘justify’ their decision (which was made on 25 July 1945) by U.S. President Truman to now go forward by creating and expanding ultimately throughout the world an American empire, the first target of which would be to conquer Russia — the very same country that had actually won WW2 for the Allies. Agents for the U.S. regime lie profusely about history in order to deceive the public that the U.S. and/or Britain was/were mainly responsible for the defeat of Hitler and the Allied victory in WW 2. We’re inundated with that propaganda.
So: the American empire, which began with a plethora of lies, is now ending with a campaign against the Gazans that might ultimately become remembered as being the second-worst genocide in history — #1 being, of course, the Holocaust by Hitler and his German Third Empire (which was carried out not by bombings and a siege like the Israel-U.S. one now is, but instead by search-and-destroy operations against its ‘racial’ targets, plus industrialized mass-murdering “concentration camps”). Though the means of carrying out the genocide aren’t identical, both of those campaigns rightfully earn the world’s contempt and disgust.
Yet the U.S. Government is a full partner with Israel’s Government in carrying out this ethnic cleansing or possibly even full genocide of the Gazans. Biden fully supports Israel’s ethnic cleansing or even genocide against the Gazans, though he speaks against it in order to fool enough voters so as to win a second term. Furthermore, the Washington Postreported on 18 March 2024 that ever since 27 October 2023, Biden has known that Israel’s saying they intending to kill only Hamas is a lie and that they’re bombing and sieging Gaza so as to exterminate or otherwise get rid of all of its residents. So, if Netanyahu gets convicted and hung for this genocide, then Biden ought to get hung too, because he is the person who authorizes all of the weapons, ammunition and guidance, in order for Israel to do it.
And there also are other ways in which the U.S. regime is shamefully behaving while its previously ever-expanding empire is starting to fall apart.
Anyone who would call this a democracy would have to be either blind or crazy. The only way that the U.S. regime can keep it going is on the basis of lies. And now the empire that is based upon those lies is starting to fall apart. The key event will be when the first NATO member Government will either block a NATO action or else quit the NATO alliance. Or else, if neither of those happens, then the key event will be what will happen because neither of them did happen: WW3. Either the empire will collapse, or else the entire world will self-destruct as a result of the U.S. Government’s actions.
A growing number of media outlets in America and in Europe have recently reached the conclusion that “rules-based international order” long espoused by the West has failed.
In essence, this means that the position of the Western powers in the world has weakened: they have failed to destroy the Russian economy by imposing sanctions, and the war in Gaza has demonstrated that the US and the Western European countries are far from all-powerful.
The media frequently claim that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine has changed the international situation, in that it has made clear the limited capabilities of the West and deepened the rift between the West and the Global South.
The Ukrainian conflict and the war in Gaza have demonstrated to the whole world, and above all to ordinary people in the West, that their ruling elites are unable to grasp this reality, lack strategic vision and are generally guided by their own personal interests.
The ruling elites in the West have demonized Russia in every possible way and have come to believe the myth that Russia can be strategically defeated. This is a huge miscalculation and this conclusion will become obvious to all in the very near future. The present author is reminded of the junker Grushnitsky, in Lermontov’s “A Hero of Our Time,” a fantasist who plays the role of an unworldly romantic for so long that he begins to believe it himself.
As Vladimir Putin has aptly put it, “Russophobia, like any other ideology based on racism, national superiority and exclusivity, blinds the person who subscribes to it and deprives them of reason.”
The state of the “rules-based international order” is becoming increasingly alarming for many Western powers. According to an article published in the weekly journal the Economist on February 15, so-called national conservatives, who “suspect free markets of being rigged by the elites,” are gaining in influence in the US and Europe. They are also hostile to migration, despise pluralism, especially multiculturalism, and are obsessed with dismantling institutions they see as tainted by globalism.
Despite their differences, these national conservatives are united by their hostility to shared enemies, including migrants, especially Muslims, globalists and all their perceived enablers. Donald Trump is leading in the polls in America. The far right is expected to make gains in the European Parliament elections in June. In Germany last December, support for the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AFD) reached a record high of 23 percent, according to polls. Anticipating Rishi Sunak’s loss in the elections, the right wing of Britain’s Conservative Party are hoping to grab power in the party. In 2027, Marine Le Pen may well become president of France.
According to the Economist, the current authorities need to take people’s legitimate concerns seriously: the public in many Western countries see illegal migration as a source of unrest and a drain on the public purse. They worry that their children will grow up poorer than they are. They are concerned about losing their jobs to new technologies. They believe that institutions such as universities and the press have been hijacked by hostile, illiberal, left-wing elites. They view the globalists who have flourished over the last few decades as members of a self-serving, arrogant caste.
These complaints have real merit and mocking them only confirms how detached from reality the elites have become.
The position of Washington and its hangers-on in Europe in relation to Israel’s war crimes against the Palestinians in Gaza has added significantly to the public’s distrust of the West’s ruling elites. By openly supporting the actions of the Netanyahu government, the governments of the Western powers are convincing everyone, including their own populations, of their own policy of double standards: only the lives of Israelis are valued and massacres of Arabs are allowed.
As the Saudi newspaper Arab News reports, Arab and Muslim Americans, and 60 percent of all other Americans, have for months wanted President Joe Biden to pressure Israel into agreeing to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The White House has, in effect, ignored these pleas.
In response to this stance, Muslim Americans in nine potentially wavering states met in Dearborn, Michigan, in December 2023 under the slogan “Abandon Biden, Truce Now.” They have vowed not to vote for Biden in the presidential election unless he changes the policies that are enabling Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip possible.
The US journal Foreign Affairs, in an article entitled “Gaza and the End of the Rules-Based Order” quotes one G7 diplomat: “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we did with the Global South (around Ukraine) was lost. … Forget the rules, forget the world order. They will never listen to us again.”
The economic recession, which has become a permanent situation for many European states, also provides little room for optimism. In the US, the high inflation and huge government debt are expected to worsen this spring and summer, according to some analysts. The most closely watched indicator of opinions about the economy, a monthly poll conducted by the University of Michigan, has reported that public confidence is at an exceptionally low ebb, about the same level as during the 2007-2009 global financial crisis.
With the presidential election just nine months away, this gloomy mood has become a serious problem for the Democrats. President Joe Biden is already facing a host of challenges to his bid for a second term, starting with concerns about his fitness for office as an 80-year-old man. Another major obstacle to his election bid is the opinion polls that give him low marks for his management of the economy.
The current economic problems are exacerbated by growing inequality, the worsening drug crisis and the proliferation of firearms. The promotion of non-traditional sexual orientation and the encouragement of same-sex couples have cause legitimate outrage to many conservative religious people.
In the European Union between June 6 and 9, more than 400 million voters in 27 countries will elect 720 MEPs to represent them for the next five years. Observers predict an increase in the influence of right-wing conservative parties. One major reason for the heightened interest in the upcoming election is the unprecedented corruption scandal that erupted in the European Parliament in December 2022, when the vice president and several other officials, including three MEPs, were accused of taking bribes. The investigation is ongoing, but it has already revealed instances of illegal activities and immoral behavior on the part of MEPs. Conservatives accuse the EU of being an opaque bureaucracy with vastly overpaid staff, which is disconnected from the reality experienced by ordinary residents of the EU member states, and which spends its vast budgets – totaling hundreds of trillions of euros – not for the common good but for the personal whims and fantasies of its leaders. Inflation and the cost of living are still rising in many European nations, while many blame EU bureaucrats in Brussels for policies such as the Green Deal that have made life more expensive for Europeans by raising the prices of fuel, food and most other essentials. In addition, anti-Russian sanctions, which have led to the rejection of cheap energy from Russia by a number of European countries, have had a negative impact on the well-being of ordinary citizens.
Over the past few weeks, thousands of farmers from across Europe, particularly from Germany, France, Poland, Spain, and Belgium, have taken to the streets to protest against additional spending on Ukraine and against new EU environmental policies that make farming unviable.
The short-sighted policy of the Western elites with regard to the crises in Ukraine and the Gaza Strip is leading to a loss of confidence in the ruling authorities on the part of ordinary citizens. It is easy to imagine their reaction in the event of any further military setbacks by Ukraine or any worsening of the situation within the country.
The position taken by many developing nations with regard to the current international processes is highly symptomatic. In an editorial for the Arabic international newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, Editor-in-Chief Grhassan Charbel writes: “Zelensky’s position reminded me of remarks by the late Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to former Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, that ‘the one who is covered by the Americans is naked.’ The same phrase could be said by Putin to Zelensky.
Putin has the right to be sarcastic. The leaders of the West did not accept that he could not lose… That he went to Ukraine to punish the entire West and to launch a major coup against a world that was born from the collapse of the (Berlin) Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union.”
It is no coincidence that the ruling circles of Western Europe are currently not hiding their anxiety about what they refer to as the “threat posed by Trump and Russia.”
In fact, everything we see happening testifies to the inadequacy of the current ruling elites in the West, who are unable to reasonably and rationally assess the emerging situation, guided as they are solely by short-term personal interests.
It is very possible that they will be swept away by a wave of new unexpected events, and new leaders will come to power.
It is therefore highly likely that 2024 will be a turning point in many respects.
After the Crash 