Anti-semitism has been over-stated and used as a political weapon for generations now. It became beyond the pale after World War II and has stayed that way in the West and America. This isn’t to say there weren’t anti-semites, but they were powerless and damn near meaningless.
But that is changing, and it is going to keep changing. The problem is the constant use of the charge of anti-semitism itself to ward of criticisms of mass-murder, child killing, and other crimes by Israel in Palestine.
Israel wraps itself in the cloak of “we are Jews” to justify its crimes.
The distinction between Israeli, Zionist and Jewish isn’t being blurred most dangerously by Israel’s enemies, but by Israel itself.
And the intellectual propaganda is making it worse.
Take this article from “Tablet Magizine”, which according to their “About US” is a “Jewish Magazine about the world.”
It’s a long screed saying that the Talmud has a different conception of morality than Christian morality. “So far, so good”, you might think if you weren’t aware of Israel’s recent actions.
Let’s read a large chunk to get a feel for the argument.
Speaking in terms of religious archetypes, a Jew and a Christian can come to vastly different conclusions about what the right thing to do is in a given situation, particularly where something as ugly as war is involved. What would Jesus do if a Hamas fighter held a Gazan Arab child up as a shield while firing? Hard to say for sure, but anyone who argues that a properly humane response is to die rather than to try to shoot around the child has ample basis in Christianity. The image of the Crucifixion may mean many things, but part of what it means is that accepting corporeal defeat in this world can be a path to God-like virtue and spiritual victory in the world of tomorrow. You will not hear Jesus mentioned when Western leaders speak on how important it is that Israel adhere to international laws of war, but the concept of the innocent civilian enshrined in these laws grew practically out of wars fought within Christendom during the last several hundred years.
More importantly, the very idea of the innocent civilian makes sense in an explicitly Christian context: “Render unto Caesar” plus the idea of a universal community of faith that transcends nationality means the conscience of the individual is paramount, and a person cannot so easily be classed as a targetable enemy “just because” of his membership in some nation waging war.
There is no propaganda from Israel’s enemies that is as dangerous to Jews as this is. If you read carefully, it basically says that there are only innocent civilians, even innocent children, if they are of the same faith as the nation fighting the war, especially if Jews feel that their existence as a people is threatened. (Leave aside, of course, that committing mass murder of women and children is likely to make Jews less safe, not more.)
I mean, this is Nazi anti-semitic level propaganda. There is nothing the Nazis said about Judaism that was worse than what this idiot has just said. “It’s OK to kill non-Jewish innocents, en-masse, if we think it protects Jews.”
And further on he spends time saying it’s what Yahweh wants. (Admitted, the God of the old Testament is often a bastard, but do you want to lean in to, embrace and announce to the world that this is what Judaism is?)
There is no world in which there is not going to be a massive upsurge in anti-semitism, because there is no world in which Israel is not using Jewish identity and religion to justify mass murder of children and women.
Further, the US empire is collapsing. It’s clear to everyone that it’s weak. It’s being kicked out of Africa. It can’t keep the sea lanes open against a bunch of Yemenis. The BRICS are creating a new trade currency, countries are using local currency for trade and China is dumping dollars by the container-ship load. Meanwhile NATO proxy forces in Ukraine are being whipped, the Israelis can’t conquer a small city and Europe is losing its industrial base.
Coming down off the high of being the hegemonic power is going to hurt like a multi-decade hangover, and Israel has been flaunting its control of American government (no, don’t waste my time or yours denying it.)
The only people who have done more damage to Jews than Israel and its defenders are the Nazis.
And that’s before we get to to the fact that they’re losing this war.
Like anyone sane, with the least pretense of morality, I abhor real anti-semitism, as opposed to the fake shit used as a political weapon.
But this is being done to Jews, by the country which wraps itself in its Judaism. It’s not Nazis leading charge to ramp up anti-semitism, it’s Jews who support Israel.
And, speaking personally, after the use of anti-semitism charges to take out Jeremy Corbyn and to whitewash a genocide, well, even I will have to assume that any charge of anti-semitism against anyone is prima-facie fake and just a political weapon.
That isn’t on me, it’s on those who have used charges of anti-semitism as a political weapon to justify mass murder and avoid humane welfare policies.
Again, Jews have no greater enemy in the world than Israel.
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bruce wilder
Why couldn’t Corbyn and his allies and supporters fight back effectively against the charge of antisemitism even though those charges were blatantly insincere?
Ian Welsh
According to at least one study, the media was lying about Corbyn 75% of the time.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/jeremy-corbyn-media-bias-labour-mainstream-press-lse-study-misrepresentation-we-can-t-ignore-bias-a7144381.html
An academic study found that Corbyn’s views were absent or misrepresented 74% of the time.
https://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/projects/corbyn/Cobyn-Report.pdf
There was some fight back from social media and alternative media (particularly “The Canary”), but it was not effective.
This took time. In the first election Corbyn barely lost (due to Labour party sabotage), in the second he lost decisively and you can see the degradation over time in his popularity scores. At first people were quite impressed by their initial impressions, but years of hammering away by Labour itself and the media took its toll.
someofparts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHs7s8g-
Between the 10 min and 15 min marks, Ritter lays out what is ahead for Israel.
Personally, for what remains of my inconsequential little life, it feels like I have more free time now because, thanks to this website and podcasts from people like Scott Ritter, I understand, in broad strokes, what the future is going to be for my corner of the world. So now, listening to the litanies of bad news from Washington, Europe or Israel is no longer telling me anything new. It is just filling in depressing details of a story where I finally understand which way the plot is heading.
I am grateful that I won’t live to see the worst of it. I hope the children my friends and relations have had will find ways to have loving, decent lives despite the possible impending dark ages they will live through. I will try to remain quiet around all of these people who are younger than I am because I am well and truly ashamed of what my generation has done to them. The least I can do is spare them my empty talk.
Mark Level
Excellent post, Ian. Entirely on point.
Let’s not forget all the anti-Zionist Jews who have been making exactly the same point for years, either: Norman Finkelstein, Robert Scheer, Max Blumenthal, Gabor Mate (a holocaust survivor as an infant in Hungary, still living) & his sons including most prominently Aaron Mate, Nora Barrows-Freedman of the Electronic Intifada, Jeffrey Sachs, in the last 3 years Keaton Weiss & Russell Dobular of the Due Dissidence podcast & many others. Sadly, I cannot recall the name of the prominent, older Israeli Jewish critic of Zionism who was just refused entry to the EU recently to speak at a conference recently, on Germany’s demand, but I’m sure someone in this thread will know.
Israel uses the same tactics & lies over & over even when past lies have been discredited– I’m sure we all remember the first time they bombed al-Shifa hospital (before totally demolishing it, killing 200+ patients & staff, MDs, burying them in mass graves) when they produced an “Intell tape” of 2 “Hamas” speaking poor Arabic and saying “Yeah, we actually bombed it, but let’s keep that secret.” (I had listened to Harry Shearer’s podcast Le Show for many years & previously admired him; when he ran a story promoting this I dropped him cold.)
Recently Israel revived the same fake fabricated lie with another “audio record” of Israelis speaking poor Arabic saying, ooh, yeah, when they legitimately bombed our 2 fighters it spread to the weapons cache we left near those tents in the “safe zone”, where 45+ people, mostly women & children died in grotesque agony (burning alive, a father holding up his child’s decapitated body). This was shared on Chapo Trap house recently by guest Dereck Davidson of the American Prestige podcast. Of course, the Biden Admin & the MSM repeat the Israeli lies as if they’re credible. Wash, rinse, repeat. There is NO “red line” that the dotard Joe has ever issued that hasn’t been flagrantly crossed by Israel. But Joe will share, for the 15th time, the “pictures of 40 decapitated (Israeli) babies” he saw!! Oh, & don’t forget the “mass rapes” though not even one living victim has come forward, & the NYT lied about a woman whose own family said she was blown up by an incendiary device (likely fired by Israel on people near the music festival, including Jews) with no rape having occurred.
Joe won’t live long enough to face the Hague, but I do have to wonder morbidly if Blinken, Sullivan, Admiral Kirby, Vedant Patel & the other justifiers of the ongoing genocide will.
StewartM
You know, Tablet Magazine did a better job advocating for Christianity than most Christians I’ve heard. The writer nailed it: the spirit of the martyrs of the early Church in regards to their tormentors (and I know this is the Cecil B. DeMille version of history, and to a degree fabricated) was “better I die than you, because I go to a better place than earth; while if you die now you will go to a worse place”. You saw that in later martyrs too—their last words were an appeal to God to mitigate judgement of the people about to murder them, rather than to call down retribution on them.
Judaism started out as a tribal religion, and although it during the Roman empire era up to the 6th century had a universalist phase (converting non-Jews to the faith) it has largely remained so. This may be good insofar as preserving religious diversity in the world (Islam and Christianity are the two most horrible ones about wiping other faiths out) but the problem with non-universalist faiths is that they can easily slip into thought patterns where non-believers aren’t fully human. With Judaism, the conquest of Canaan as described in the Old Testament was outright genocide; while it almost certainly actually did not occur by archaeological findings, the justification for believers is there.
This why Christian Nationalism in the US actually resembles more Judaism’s tribalism than it does actual Christian tradition (though admittedly not actual practice). They quote the Old Testament and all that smiting going on far more than the New. After all, Jesus had nothing whatsoever to say about either abortion or homosexuality in the Gospels; those were topics he apparently felt not worth mentioning. He did have some terribly discouraging things about the afterlife prospects of rich people, however.
StewartM
Bruce Wilder
Why couldn’t Corbyn and his allies and supporters fight back effectively against the charge of antisemitism even though those charges were blatantly insincere?
What Ian said.
Remember the exchange we had a months or even a year ago, when I said ‘outright lying shouldn’t be allowed in the press?” Because if someone can “flood the airwaves with shit” [Steve Bannon] things like this happen.
This also sets a limitation on how well peaceful, non-violent resistance [Gandhi, MLK) can work—it requires at least a neutral, and better yet, a sympathetic press. If they are openly hostile to you and your cause, no matter how noble and good your cause and how righteous you are individually, if they can tell outright lies about you, you will be violently crushed to hearty applause because the public is convinced that you are something you actually aren’t.
Ian Welsh
The press was vastly hostile to MLK, and they did plenty of damage, but a reasonable case can be made that he still “won.”
But, yes, overall.
There are ways to get around the press, but they too have been made much harder.
Jan Wiklund
If we take the Nazi comparison seriously there is no reason to think Antisemitism is bound to win. The Nazis used the Germans in the same way as the Israeli state use the Jews.
Nazis thought that only Germans mattered, like Israel thinks that only Jews matter. But we don’t hate Germans today. We even didn’t in 1945 (if we are to believe George Orwell) we were just tired of them.
After all, we were intellectually capable of make a difference between Nazi pretentions and reality.
Which is, of course, not to deny that the Israeli propaganda channels do a lot damage to Jews in general.
Ian Welsh
Anti-semitism was rampant in the West until the extermination camps were discovered. Multiple countries turned back Jewish refugees rather than accept them.
It was the genocide itself that made anti-semitism unacceptable, and also fascism/Nazism.
Thermobarbaric
Mark Level, I think the Jewish critic you’re thinking of is Ilan Pappe who was recently also held and interrogated when trying to enter the USA at Detroit Airport. Pappe was asked if he was an antisemite.
The critic of Israel who was refused entry into Germany to attend a conference was Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta who was going to speak about the ongoing war crimes he had personally witnessed in Gaza.
Here is a link to a Guardian article that covers both their experiences.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/21/ilan-pappe-israel-gaza-zionism
Oakchair
According to at least one study, the media was lying about Corbyn 75% of the time.
——
Consider the implications of societal institutions lying non-stop all the time. What lies has everyone believed that are harmful, but help the oligarchs? Which Truth Sayers have been slandered, and silenced? We know the press and our institutions do not care at all about us, honesty, or morality.
Next time the press or any mainstream institution tells you to do something are they lying? If they are using logical fallacies such as a bandwagon, appeal to authority, appeal to vanity (if you do this you’re good and smart), insults, etc. it’s a red flag they are lying.
**We can substitute lying with people who believe the lies as true and repeat them.
different clue
Should we consider the possibility that the Israel-Gov personnel seek to re-antisemitise the countries with big Jewish populations deliberately and on purpose. . . so as to make Jews so genuinely unsafe and unwanted in North and South America, Europe, and Australia that several million Jews will feel driven to move to Israel? Thereby giving Israel a harvest of several million new Jews to work with?
Well . . . as Beau of the Fifth Column would say . . . ” It’s just a thought. Y’all have a good day. “
Bill R
I grew up in a family that strongly supported the Jews and their right to a homeland, although my British army uncle had a friend killed by a Jewish bomb before the state of Israel existed. I also used to think the Jews deserved ‘special treatment’ for the past crimes to their faith. I no longer can accept the evils of the State of Israel who wrap themselves in a cloak of being the chosen ones who have suffered.
The State of Israel is now committing a holocaust against the Palestinian peoples after years of committing genocide. As you have mentioned, Israel’s actions of killing with impunity all around the world [with support from US & UK and the largest banks] has led me and many others to think their actions are now worse than the crimes they accuse their enemies of doing.
Feral Finster
Zionist demands for special pleading and outrageous double standards, not to mention their insistence on conflating “Jews” and “Israel” and that Israel can do no wrong have created more genuine antisemites than anything that the morons on Stormfront ever could have achieved in their wildest dreams.
Apparently, I am not the only one to use such logic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portage_to_San_Cristobal_of_A.H.#:~:text=The%20book%20was%20controversial%2C%20particularly,%22benefactor%20of%20the%20Jews%22.
For that matter, before 1945, antisemitism was depressingly commonplace. After 1945, it was reserved for cranks and freaks.
Raad
The destruction of Corbyn was really something you had to be living through to understand how powerful and prolific it was: much of the modern (western) propaganda apparatus took birth during the start of the reactionary backlash (to me most modern liberals are also reactionaries fwiw) to Corbyn and it slowly became powerful during the onset of the Syrian Civil War and the campaign against ISIS.
It was unrelenting and everywhere: I’m not really rich but because of health I usually take taxis to hospital and other such places but I walked back then so missed this crucial aspect, most ordinary folk just got told lies and the lies were crafted to meet audience segments, from the bite size clips as part of radio news updates, especially BBC radio alongside the longer more “thoughtful” but ultimately trash longer talk radio crap.
And that’s just radio: daytime was described to me as a trash in the mid 00s when I was teen by a friend who had to watch that garbage while recovering from an accident and from the brief hits of it I get when I’m in a waiting room with a tv, the Corbyn years would have driven me into suicide if I watched that garbage. Unfortunately most people over here get news and views (again, extremely unfortunately) from either radio, tv or the printed press which I did actually get some exposure to during the Corbyn years and it was probably the most tame of the rabid anti Corbyn stuff (yikes).
All of this was very well crafted and designed to be jammed into people’s heads without consent most of the times. Nevertheless what the Corbyn movement managed despite the opposition seriously shook the UK elite so don’t expect anything like that short of a very real revolution (still possible: most of the clever types have shifted into the labour apparatus and might come back but not before there is a groundswell of change in the populace). A lot of good people risked a lot as the reactionaries waged their war and only some with any power have survived, albeit hiding.
Aside from the propaganda, Ian notes something back then: that most of the popular young UK celebrity types all were positive or outright Corbyn supporters and that was also heavily true of all of us that were 20+ but under 40. There was plenty of left stuff back then that wasn’t garbage that I’m not sure survived the purges given I’m not active in left circles anymore.
Probably the biggest thing for me that pissed me off was how the soft left fucked him and the rest of the movement over with bullshit and make no mistake: the pro EU FBPE crowd were lead by very clever propagandists and other assorted cretins, who splintered and destroyed any possible left unity (and there was plenty, at the start, especially during the heydays of 2017), in the same way American GOP use fringe shit to split their opponents voting base. All of this crap was self destructive TNT: and it was always going to bite the liberals in name only who stood to lose the most and it is happening now as there is no more left, save for those in hiding.
There has been countless words written about all this but living through it all was a nightmare and heartbreaking to watch some of the most obvious awful lies paraded as the truth and none were as complicit as the soft left and all the other dickheads that would all lose the death bet as per Ian.
Mark Level
Thank you, Thermobarb!! Also for the link.
Yes, I may have conflated the 2 incidents, I am far more familiar with Ilan Pappe, who I have seen referenced by Blumenthal, the UK’s Owen Jones (not Jewish, Irish I believe or Brit) & others. But I did hear about this cancelling of truth tellers.
It’s just like trying to cancel/ shut down the students, basically criminal because you can’t credibly argue against their facts, so you just try to shut them up entirely. While you bray endlessly on about how “We’re a democracy!! & Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” Absurd lies that only morons believe . . .
On a personal level, I have some good news where I live to share– Duluth, Minnesota is not a large city, local iron & other ores available to be shipped from the East of us all played out in 1957, & the population is less than half of what it was back then, a decaying rust belt town with some huge beautiful buildings from before the US as a whole deindustrialized. Anyway, I live downtown & park across the street from City Hall. Recently I saw a group of tents there, & it is a Gaza BDS effort by young and old to try to pressure the city to Boycott, Divest & Sanction. I went and chatted with the folks, young & old, even kids, gave them money for support and am attending a rally with them on Saturday morning. We’ve had small rallies (80+ was the most people at the first one) at a major traffic center on Fridays since the genocide started, run by Grandmothers for Peace and others, but it was inspiring to see people (few if any are students, I thought) camping out to oppose genocide. There is grassroots opposition everywhere except among the rich donors & the Elite Political–Academic–MIC goons.
Bill R
anyone have a link to video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHs7s8g-] on youtube as it says unavailable – censored?
Willy
Worldwide anti-semitism revived, mostly because of a couple psychos in power. And no, Hamas had been manageable before Mossad ‘screwed up’.
Maybe a big part of the fault comes from monotheistic religion culture embracing that Mammon is better than their particular version of the Supreme Being. Maybe God/Allah/Yahweh really needs to show up already, maybe start lightning-bolting the bad guys.
Still, I really wish it’d be “anti-genocide” instead. So tired of living in an age when crimes aren’t crimes anymore, because of some get-out-of-jail-free X Factor. Or lies. Good on the folks seeing it that way.
Curt Kastens
Stewart, you said that outright lying should not be allowed in the press. I agree in principle. But the way that gets applied in practice is that it is not me that gets to determine who is lying and who is not. It is agents of the ruling powers that get to make that call.
And if it was my call I would have said that everyone spreading alarm about the Covid pandemic were either lying or that they were dupes of those lying. And it would be very easy for those on the other side of the arguement to say that I was lying or that I was a dupe of some larger power group trying to minimize the danger of the Corona Virus.
The moral of the story is that you can only win if you are in charge. And if you are in charge it is not possible to keep everyone happy. And if you are not in power but you manage to come up with it you should hold those who made decisions that you thought were bad decisions accountable for what in your publically proclaimed opinion was misleading people from the truth. With the exact punishment determined by whether or not you thought that they were acting in good faith or whether they were motivated by personal gain. Presuming to know someone’s motives is pretty much guess work unless you know a lot about them.
Soredemos
I guess I’ll be the one to point out that Jesus was a Jew, and Christianity started as a Jewish cult. Saul/Paul was also a Jew and his strange abstract mystical beliefs emerged out of Hellenistic Judaism. Christianity is a direct offshoot of Judaism, it isn’t something alien that exists wholly separate from it.
Personally I find the Old Testament to be a shockingly crude and ugly Bronze Age relic, and find the very notion of mining some sort of universal ethics out of it self-evidently absurd (it’s a story by and for a specific ethnic and religious community, it isn’t concerned much with outsiders, other than providing rules to regulate making them slaves). But some people have tried to do just that (for instance Hajo Meyer, a critic of Zionism). Christianity itself was really just the most large scale attempt at it.
Dan
The State of Israel is just fine with antisemitism in the West, if it means more Jews will emigrate and help them win the demographic war against Palestinian Arabs. And white nationalists are fine with Israel, if it means all the Jews will leave their own countries.
Why else do you think Netanyahu’s idiot son Yair is always palling around with alt-right types?
StewartM
Curt Kastens
Stewart, you said that outright lying should not be allowed in the press. I agree in principle. But the way that gets applied in practice is that it is not me that gets to determine who is lying and who is not. It is agents of the ruling powers that get to make that call.
Curt, as I hold many positions in the minority and I am well aware that a prohibition of lying in the press could be abused by the powerful. I well know there’s the danger that the things I believe, no matter how well-supported by the facts or reasonably argued, could be declared to be ‘lies’.
But as it stands now, there is NO penalty for the powerful to tell lies. And moreover people like me don’t really have much of any platform for the things I believe or hold dear. Since it’s only the powerful who have real access to the media (because they own them!!) a prohibition, properly applied, could be of great benefit. I used to be a adamant pro-free speech advocate, and insofar as ‘arguments made from facts’ I still am. But call me disillusioned and embittered about how “the truth” will win out over the lies, certainly not in the short term, and maybe not even in any period of time where the truth winning actually matters.
I also leave you with this point–the greatest catastrophe in US history, the Civil War, happened largely because Southern newspapers printed outright lies about Abraham Lincoln and his party’s goals in 1860. Instead of reporting that Lincoln declared that he had no power over slavery where it existed, but wanted to prohibit its spread to the territories, Southern newspapers printed things as extreme as “Abraham Lincoln is running on a platform of freeing all the slaves and then having them marry white women”, or other such inflammatory nonsense. That’s largely why the South went apeshit after the election of 1860 and seceded.
Soredemos
@StewartM
The crushing of the slave power and freeing of four million people wasn’t a catastrophe.
Further, the Southern aristocracy jumped the gun and started the war not because of dishonest propaganda, but because they took Lincoln’s threats to restrict slavery seriously. The slave power depended on new expansion to survive long term. They’d been directing foreign policy to this end for years. They saw in Lincoln a real threat of that coming to an end. With no expansion slavery would wither and die. Propaganda may have helped get regular people into uniform, but it isn’t what caused the conflict.
(see also Marx and his sober analysis of the material causes of the conflict. He made and wrote it contemporary to the actual events, and it would take 150 years for other historiography to catch up and realize he was correct all along).
someofparts
People who themselves practice good faith are baffled by the way malefactors dismiss the possibility of cooperation out of hand. Why would anyone, be it Southern leadership during the Civil War, or our contemporary neocons, refuse to accept neutrality or promises of non-intervention. I think I figured out why this is the case.
I think the difference is that people who know themselves to be criminals only trust those who are also compromised, because they believe this gives them real control over such people. Of course when criminals control the press, they can convince the public that even honest people are compromised. But one way or another, treating an adversary as tarnished is their stock response because, as criminals, this is how they think. (Maybe that is the real reason Trump drives them crazy, because smearing people is their go-to tactic and the more they use it on Trump the more popular he gets.)
I think the revolting press attacks on Corbyn were what personally brought me to peak disgust with Zionism, until Gaza of course. For all of us here who deplored the way the UK press attacked him, I’m sharing a link to the letter written by his sons.
Even though he never got a chance to save the UK, if at the end of the day your own children think the world of you, there is, in my book, no higher praise than that. If, even more than that, you have inspired your children to carry on the causes you cherished, this is how serious change becomes possible, because the big things can’t be done in a single lifespan.
https://www.thecanary.co/uk/news/2019/12/14/jeremy-corbyns-sons-pay-tribute-to-their-honest-father-who-took-on-an-entire-establishment/
Revelo
What Israel is doing in Gaza is no worse than the wars and other atrocities in places like Ethiopia, Myanmar, etc that ordinary people in the USA seldom hear of. If USA propaganda machine wanted to shut down reporting about Gaza, it could do so. Evidently, some powerful forces decided it was better to amplify versus suppress reporting about this issue.
Israel is a valuable USA forward military outpost for controlling middle east but it is not fully loyal to USA like the British and Australian attack dogs, also is increasingly a USA liability because of its inability to resolve the Palestinian issue, which poisons relations with enormous and hugely important Muslim world. So probably USA deep state subconsciously decided time has come to discipline or even liquidate Israel, and best way to do that is give Israel enough rope to hang itself. To reiterate, USA propaganda machine could suppress reporting on this issue if it wanted Israel to succeed in expelling/exterminating the Palestinians, but instead it chose to turn up the publicity volume, and thus guarantee eventual Israeli failure.
Stormcrow
@ Bill R
I’m not certain I found the replacement you asked for. But I did find this:
It’s an interview of Scott Ritter, by Danny Haiphong, dated two days ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHHs7s8g-ho
And between 10 to 15 minutes in, he does, indeed, lay out how the consequences of this war will destroy the state of Israel as it is presently constructed, i.e., as a Zionist colonial project. He even goes so far as to give the time span required for the finale. Namely, 10 years, counting from now. If he’s right, Israel as we know it today, will be gone by 2035.
Soredemos
@Revelo
Bait, but I’ll respond. It literally is worse. When it’s over there won’t be any Palestinians left alive in Gaza.
Dallas C. Galvin
Brilliant analysis; cleared away the mental fog that witnessing genocide in real time — & feeling paralyzed to remedy it — has caused. Real Thanks, Ian! Re: StewartM, et al., on elites, news suppression, & even “The Tablet” article: The dearth of alt. media, in fact, of bona fide media across the board, is a major part of the problem. “We” are stuck w/the drip feeds of news from the MSM &/or gleaning what we can from specialized, solidarity shattering social media.
A dollop of history: In response to the international “red”/ leftward political turn of the ‘Sixties, Giovanni Agnelli (Fiat, etc.) convened a small group of leaders in big-time industry, media, and politics around 1974 to remedy the situation. And go-forth with that mission they did. At the time, the media bible, “Editor & Publisher Annual,” looked like the NYC phone book. Huge. It noted (addresses, principals, circ., etc.) 100s of thousands of TV, radio, newspaper, and magazine companies worldwide, most of them independent or in very small groups. Today, it more resembles a small town phone book, (if they even exist!).
For, as though by Divine Intervention, by 1982-‘83, some 84 entities owned the bulk of all those outlets, and soon thereafter, the number dwindled to perhaps ten or twenty owners. Meanwhile, local news outlets disappeared by their thousands and reporters, printers, delivery trucks, the works had vanished.
Yes, the standard explanation that the “economics” of publishing and tastes were changing is surely true. But shake that tree hard and you’ll see that the hunger for real news, real stories, real reporting has not abated, and the need for competitive national news beyond the TV snippets that sound identical because they were all milled at the same factory remains. Indeed, interestingly enough that same Giovanni Agnelli’s (great?) grandson has begun to resuscitate their old media empire. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose…