The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 08/11/23
Disappearing The Disappearing
There is so much which could be said - should be said, must be said - about the Zionist genocide in Gaza (and its slow-motion equivalent in the illegally-occupied West Bank): about the impunity with which the Apartheid entity in Tel-Aviv indiscriminately murders civilians by the thousand with totally impunity; about the enthusiasm with which the 'leaders' of the 'civilised' world (i.e., the Untied Struts of Amnesia and its satraps in London, Paris, Berlin and Brussels) rushed in to support a supposed 'right to defend itself' for the racial-supremacist project which they deny to a people under brutal, gleefully vicious occupation for three-quarters of a century; about calls for a ceasefire from the clear majority of the citizens of those states being ignored by those who claim to be the clever, sensible Adults in power; about how even calling for such a cessation of violence is deemed to be an expression of 'hate' (and, of course, 'anti-Semitism', despite the large numbers of the Children of Avram supporting such a call); about how daring to march for peace within a few miles (and a full twenty-four hours) of a feel-good solemn-fest for the undeserved medal-wearing classes in London is treated as 'terrorism' (the people of France and Germany - having, unlike the god-like Brits, retained their sense of who exactly should demarcate their freedoms - have sent a gigantic Fous le camp! and Verpiss dich! to Macron and Scholz respectively).
(The capitulation to this agenda by such as Sir Sheer Stumer and his fellow 'moderates' need not detain us here, nor the sub-human vocalisations of Suella Braverman: it would be a bit like analysing ursine defecatory habits; you would end up no better informed and be left with nothing more than the overpowering stench of shit).
And this is before we get on to our free, fearless and utterly-unbiased-oh-dear-me-yes 'news' media. Whether it is their response as automatic transponders of whatever self-justificatory bullshit emanates out of the mental nether orifices of Zionist politicians and officials; or the equally instinctive rush to cast doubt on casualty figures, whereby the death-toll is always qualified by stating that the figures come from the 'Hamas-led health ministry', just to put over the required message that the figures - despite their having been independently verified - are not to be believed because they come from TERRORISTS!!!, conveniently ignoring that Hamas is all that the Gazans have for a government...
(I eagerly look forward to the next screw-up in the NHS in England being described by the State Broadcaster as being the responsibilty of the 'Tory-led' health ministry, or the Guaraniad reporting next week's crisis (there's never a long waiting list for a crisis, as opposed to trying to get a GP appointment) in the service in Cymru as being down to the 'Labour-led' minister)
...added to the hectoring of Palestinians in general - and their (non-Hamas) officials - by the cadre of self-righteous boobs and boors which constitutes the opining classes; and the constant use of slanted language by the self-same self-satisifed stenographers to create that impression which is required by those who would lead us into distraction.
Why this should be so is easy enough to divinate, of course. At a geopolitical level, it is because the Self-Righteous State is in a convenient location for the USAnians and their fanbois to watch over the surly - and inconveniently oil-rich - natives of the Levant and Arabia Deserta who, without close scrutiny, might decide on a government which protects them rather than ExxonMobil and BP. From an historical viewpoint, it is the consequence of that State guilt-tripping the entire Western World™ into permanent collective self-abasement over the Shoah, and the touting of Occupied Palestine as the only safe place for Jews on the whole planet (almost as if Brooklyn and Barnet had never existed).
(Incidental to this, I would assert that it is inevitable that if you have spent seventy-five years browbeating the whole world into agreeing that Eretz Yisra'el is something to which all Jews automatically belong - irrespective of what many Jews might wish - then when that State commits atrocities, those same populations will so identify Jewishness with that State that collective guilt will be assumed, with a concomitant ineluctable rise in anti-Semitic sentiment being the result. This is, of course, utterly wrong - the humane traditions of Jewish culture and Judaism are diametrically opposed to the hateful colonialist project of Zionism. Zionism is not a religion - despite many of its adherents treating it as one - nor is it a ethnic identity; it is a political ideology - and a particularly nasty one - which must, like all such constructs, be forever open to critique, criticism and where necessary condemnation).
We are being, have been, will continue to be bullshat in the same way as we have been over Ukraine...
...but with a signal difference.
For, where we were propagandised into unquestioning support for Zelenskiy and his rather, 'ow-you-say, regrettable allies as being the victims (as the people of Ukraine who don't have millions stashed safely away out of reach or jurisdiction have been), this time we are being enjoined, earbashed and bonce-coshed into siding with the perpetrators of these war crimes rather than their unwilling and undeserving recipients.
Now, leaving aside the geopolitical considerations I mentioned above, can you think of what might be the key difference between the Ukrainians and the Palestinians, boys and girls?
Apart from the fact of the Palestinians having being effectively erased from all consideration and concern by the West's state-corporate media and most of its politicians for the entire period since the establishment of the settler-colonial régime on their land (and before that time, truth be told), what we are now seeing is the further attempted devaluation of Palestinian lives in the eyes of the world, whereby - rather like the USA's nineteenth-century designation of a black person as being a mere three-fifths of a human being - the life of a toddler in Gaza City is deemed far less valuable (and its extinguishing proportionally less troubling thereby) than that of an infant in Sderot.
To put it in its baldest terms: dead wogs don't count.
They don't count any more than they did in Afghanistan and Iraq, any more than they do now in Yemen. In short, the Orientalist (to use Edward Said's definition of the term) mindset still dominates the whole of political, media and ethical discourse in the West, and the lives and societies of Asia and Africa are to be subject either to indifference or to a patronising faux concern which is limited to the degree to which those lives and societies may be a challenge to the 'civilised' Western view of the world (in which Israelis are of course considered to be honorary whites because most of them are, or are descended from, Americans). In other words, it's the old imperial racism showing itself again.
Having said all that I have said, and the way in which I have expressed it, you may wonder why this piece doesn't appear under 'Rants'. It's a fair question, and here's my answer: sometimes, just sometimes, the truth is allowed to be heard even in the citadels of conformity which are the natural habitat of the Western journalistic or political hack. In this case, this article by Arwa Mahdawi in Tuesday's Guardian, in which she - as someone of Palestinian origin - flays the flesh off the contented consensus which passes for coverage of the massacres in Gaza and excoriatingly exposes the bare bones of the Western establishment's inhumane hypocrisy with its both-sides-ism and its whataboutery. It's one of the most powerful pieces of journalism that I have read in a corporate outlet in years, and one only hopes that the regrettable and cowardly corps of editors at the Graun don't try to commit it to the memory hole.
