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TheConsul wrote:We are letting the new barons take complete control and it won't be long before we are all Palestinians.
Molly Klein says:
July 28, 2014 at 1:34 pm
[...]
So I think this extreme of dehumanization, of reduction of populations in the spectacle to lethal insect infestations, is even beyond Nazism, and accomplished only because of the capacity of spectacle to evoke a kind of horror that reproduces the horror of Monarchical executions, of absolute and merciless power, but infinitely intensified and rendered irrational. This risk business is key as the ruling class, ever more secure, subjects humanity to immense volatility of environment. The volatility of values, of politics, real estate bubbles and rampaging paramilitaries, “extreme weather”, and ubiquitous policing – people are caged in an environment that is designed to induce constant stress and disorientation. The Hunger Games taps this and seeks to enlarge the effect on kids (to instill in them a feeling of paranoia and hostility to each other – to thwart solidarity before it can begin) and of the obligation to fight for survival. What is erased, crucially, is the dependence of the ruling class on humanity – instead all the supposedly critical visions the mass culture and the niche cultures throw up show a hoarding ruling class, and unfair distribution, but ignore and disguise the manner in which the wealth of the wealthy is produced, The illusions of scarcity of these reactionary fables actually rest on illusions of infinite plenitude – we are never to wonder how these decadent soap opera ruling classes attain such environments, with such luxurious and ever new things and capacities and energy sources. We’re just to attribute it to “technology” like a divinity, and magnificent rooms and clothes and streets and cars that grown maintain and clean themselves.
http://john-steppling.com/education-on- ... /#comments
The Consul » Mon Jul 28, 2014 3:24 pm wrote:If western media did their (long since abdicated) job more questions would have been asked regarding the run up to this massacre. Israel has since admitted that the three captured and killed Israeli teens were not killed by Hamas. There is ample evidence to suggest that Israel used this tragedy to stir up anti-Palestinian fervor to a fever pitch needed to launch the long planned ground invasion as if it were the ONLY option the Israelis could be reasonably expected to choose.
There is scant depiction in western media of the Palestinian people as anything other than dupes of Hamas (at best) or sub-human terrorists undeserving of common human rights. And even as the Secretary of State is pilloried by the Israeli press, the White House and State Department, temper their extreme displeasure with the constant qualification that Israel has no better friend or ally than the US. The bizarre is made more bizarre as it becomes routine.
If one US news team could go to Gaza and Ramallah, spend one week there reporting the stories and challenges of the people face there every day, report out for an hour a day. Show the destruction and carnage and hopelessness. Then spend a few days in Israel. Compare and contrast. Talk about the things that are seldom mentioned. We all know what rotten, evil bastards Hamas are. That is what we are supposed to know. But they didn't climb up freely out of a hole in the ceiling of hell. Hamas is a cheap tool Israel uses to keep things just the way they are, a military apartheid junta disguised as a so called democracy of a religious/ethic state.
If Israel were held accountable by someone...anyone...anything with widespread power or visibility in the west, things might have to change. But as long as they are not held to the same standards, as long as they are allowed to ignore UN resolutions and still receive billions of dollars from the US as they continue to expand and develop their nuclear arsenal (to the point where they will have deliverable ICBMs)they will continue to do as they please since American politicians fear insulting Israel more than they fear insulting any segment of their own population. Especially us.
That is nobody's fault but ours. We are letting the new barons take complete control and it won't be long before we are all Palestinians.
Israel’s Gaza Campaign Endangers US Security: Why Obama & Kerry are Furious
By Juan Cole | Jul. 28, 2014 |
By Juan Cole
The United States as a great Power is facing a large number of challenges in the Muslim world, and Israel’s Gaza campaign is endangering both American diplomacy there and the very security of the US. Given the series of setbacks for the US in the Middle East, in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Egypt, Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu could scarcely have chosen a worst time to kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians in the full light of world media.
The ability of an al-Qaeda offshoot, the so-called “Islamic State,” to take substantial territory in Syria and northern Iraq has alarmed Washington. The US embassy in Baghdad is in as much danger as the capital itself from IS violence. IS recruiting, and the radicalization of Muslim youth, is given enormous help by the scenes of Israeli munitions killing Palestinian civilians.
As security deteriorates to unprecedented lows in Libya, the US has had to pull its ambassador and her staff from Tripoli. Fundamentalist radicals in Benghazi and elsewhere, already suspicious of the US, are seeing blood because of America’s statements in support of the Israeli military campaign. The radicals already despise the US, but one doesn’t want to give them recruitment tools among the general population, most of which had been grateful for the help with overthrowing Gaddafi.
Even long-term allies of the US in the region are disturbed by the Israeli campaign. Turkey is a member of NATO, which the US is actually pledged to defend from attack. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan has been scathing about the Israeli attack on Gaza, calling it a “genocide.” There is even a possibility that Turkey will send another Mavi Marmara-style aid ship to Gaza, this time flanked by Turkish destroyers. For the US, few dilemmas are more foreboding than a military conflict between its two most important Middle East allies.
Many Egyptians, both civilian and military, blame the US for having supported the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012-2013. In fact, the US was simply dealing with the government then in power. Egyptian anchors speak darkly of a plot by the US to impose fundamentalist rule and to partition Egypt. Many Egyptians deeply dislike Hamas, but virtually the entire population of Egypt wants to see the Israeli attacks on Gaza stop. To have high US officials defend it is distasteful to them.
There have been big pro-Gaza demonstrations in Afghanistan, where the US is trying to draw down its troops. But as the US contingent there shrinks, it because more vulnerable to attack. The Taliban are making a comeback, and public anger over Gaza helps Taliban recruiting and esprit de corps.
In many parts of the Middle East, Israel’s war on Gaza’s non-combatants could easily provoke an anti-American reaction. In some places, including Iraq and Afghanistan, it could result in American troop deaths. Even in countries allied to the US, the public anger over American backing for Israel is palpable.
The Obama administration has long hoped that a regularized political Islam that participates in democratic elections could take strength away from al-Qaeda and its satellites. If Muslims can achieve dignity and prosperity toward elections, they might not, Washington seems to reason, turn to terrorism and join Ayman al-Zawahiri. Hamas participated in the 2006 elections and has a strong civil wing, and so Obama and Kerry do not share Netanyahu’s hopes of eradicating it. A Pentagon figure recently said that if Hamas were eradicated, something worse (the Islamic State?) would take its place.
Secretary of State John Kerry turned to Qatar and Turkey for advice on how to tamp down the violence. They are backers of Hamas and through them Kerry could unofficially engage with Hamas and its demands. The peace proposal he showed the Israelis on Friday evening was a non-starter for Israeli hawks on the cabinet, since it was fair to the Palestinians.
The Israeli cabinet, in contrast, was outraged that Kerry would bring them what was essentially a Hamas plan.
On Sunday, Obama called Netanyahu and twisted his arm to cease the attack on Gaza, given the high casualty rates among non-combatants and the consequent deteriorating security climate for American interests in the Middle East. Then the UN security council voted for a ceasefire, which couldn’t have happened without US collusion.
Around 9:30 pm Gaza time on Sunday, Israel stopped its shelling of Gaza. Whether the ceasefire will hold has yet to be seen. But unless there is a political deal and an end to the blockade of Gaza, one can be assured that the war will begin again sometime soon.
MacCruiskeen » Tue Jul 29, 2014 12:06 am wrote:- If you have the patience to stick with John Steppling's strange, rambling, erudite, fascinating, often frustratingly indirect blogposts, they provide a lot of insight into the dystopia currently being created by "the new barons", and into the Spectacle that both accompanies and enables it.:
http://john-steppling.com/
AP Scrambles to Revise Tweet on US Congressional Support for Gaza War
AP Also Revises Story to Seem Less Critical of Gaza Killings
by Jason Ditz, July 29, 2014
As we pointed out yesterday, Congressional leaders are falling all over themselves to back Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. The Associated Press noticed it too, tweeting out “As much of world watches Gaza war in horror, members of Congress fall over each other to support Israel.”
Which like any true statement even tangentially related to Israel sparked a furious backlash of people accusing the AP of being “pro-Hamas,” and led the AP to tweet a revision, saying only that “Many U.S. lawmakers strongly back Israel in Gaza war.”
The AP also revised their article on the story, removing “While much of the rest of the world watches the Gaza war in horror and scrambles for a ceasefire…” with simply “As the war in Gaza escalates.”
As the humanitarian calamity of the Israeli war in Gaza grows, Israel and its supporters are increasingly aggressive about any perceived criticism of the large numbers of civilians they’re killing, and are openly trying to convince the European Union to regulate the content of antiwar protests across Europe.
JULY 29, 2014
Collective Punishment in Gaza
BY RASHID KHALIDI
Three days after the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched the current war in Gaza, he held a press conference in Tel Aviv during which he said, in Hebrew, according to the Times of Israel, “I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.”
It’s worth listening carefully when Netanyahu speaks to the Israeli people. What is going on in Palestine today is not really about Hamas. It is not about rockets. It is not about “human shields” or terrorism or tunnels. It is about Israel’s permanent control over Palestinian land and Palestinian lives. That is what Netanyahu is really saying, and that is what he now admits he has “always” talked about. It is about an unswerving, decades-long Israeli policy of denying Palestine self-determination, freedom, and sovereignty.
What Israel is doing in Gaza now is collective punishment. It is punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. It is punishment for the gall of Palestinians in unifying, and of Hamas and other factions in responding to Israel’s siege and its provocations with resistance, armed or otherwise, after Israel repeatedly reacted to unarmed protest with crushing force. Despite years of ceasefires and truces, the siege of Gaza has never been lifted.
As Netanyahu’s own words show, however, Israel will accept nothing short of the acquiescence of Palestinians to their own subordination. It will accept only a Palestinian “state” that is stripped of all the attributes of a real state: control over security, borders, airspace, maritime limits, contiguity, and, therefore, sovereignty. The twenty-three-year charade of the “peace process” has shown that this is all Israel is offering, with the full approval of Washington. Whenever the Palestinians have resisted that pathetic fate (as any nation would), Israel has punished them for their insolence. This is not new.
Punishing Palestinians for existing has a long history. It was Israel’s policy before Hamas and its rudimentary rockets were Israel’s boogeyman of the moment, and before Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, punching bag, and weapons laboratory. In 1948, Israel killed thousands of innocents, and terrorized and displaced hundreds of thousands more, in the name of creating a Jewish-majority state in a land that was then sixty-five per cent Arab. In 1967, it displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians again, occupying territory that it still largely controls, forty-seven years later.
In 1982, in a quest to expel the Palestine Liberation Organization and extinguish Palestinian nationalism, Israel invaded Lebanon, killing seventeen thousand people, mostly civilians. Since the late nineteen-eighties, when Palestinians under occupation rose up, mostly by throwing stones and staging general strikes, Israel has arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians: over seven hundred and fifty thousand people have spent time in Israeli prisons since 1967, a number that amounts to forty per cent of the adult male population today. They have emerged with accounts of torture, which are substantiated by human-rights groups like B’tselem. During the second intifada, which began in 2000, Israel reinvaded the West Bank (it had never fully left). The occupation and colonization of Palestinian land continued unabated throughout the “peace process” of the nineteen-nineties, and continues to this day. And yet, in America, the discussion ignores this crucial, constantly oppressive context, and is instead too often limited to Israeli “self-defense” and the Palestinians’ supposed responsibility for their own suffering.
In the past seven or more years, Israel has besieged, tormented, and regularly attacked the Gaza Strip. The pretexts change: they elected Hamas; they refused to be docile; they refused to recognize Israel; they fired rockets; they built tunnels to circumvent the siege; and on and on. But each pretext is a red herring, because the truth of ghettos—what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in a hundred and forty square miles, about a third of the area of New York City, with no control of borders, almost no access to the sea for fishermen (three out of the twenty kilometres allowed by the Oslo accords), no real way in or out, and with drones buzzing overhead night and day—is that, eventually, the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast, and it is true in Gaza. We might not like Hamas or some of its methods, but that is not the same as accepting the proposition that Palestinians should supinely accept the denial of their right to exist as a free people in their ancestral homeland.
This is precisely why the United States’ support of current Israeli policy is folly. Peace was achieved in Northern Ireland and in South Africa because the United States and the world realized that they had to put pressure on the stronger party, holding it accountable and ending its impunity. Northern Ireland and South Africa are far from perfect examples, but it is worth remembering that, to achieve a just outcome, it was necessary for the United States to deal with groups like the Irish Republican Army and the African National Congress, which engaged in guerrilla war and even terrorism. That was the only way to embark on a road toward true peace and reconciliation. The case of Palestine is not fundamentally different.
Instead, the United States puts its thumb on the scales in favor of the stronger party. In this surreal, upside-down vision of the world, it almost seems as if it is the Israelis who are occupied by the Palestinians, and not the other way around. In this skewed universe, the inmates of an open-air prison are besieging a nuclear-armed power with one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world.
If we are to move away from this unreality, the U.S. must either reverse its policies or abandon its claim of being an “honest broker.” If the U.S. government wants to fund and arm Israel and parrot its talking points that fly in the face of reason and international law, so be it. But it should not claim the moral high ground and intone solemnly about peace. And it should certainly not insult Palestinians by saying that it cares about them or their children, who are dying in Gaza today.
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and was an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at the Madrid-Washington Palestinian-Israeli negotiations of 1991-93. His most recent book is “Brokers of Deceit.”
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