Tag: israel

Iran and Israel are exchanging missile fire and drone strikes. This is either the existential struggle of the Jewish people made manifest, or Zionist warmongering that puts the whole word in danger of nuclear conflagration.

It depends which side you’re on.

Meanwhile, back in Washington DC, Donald Trump was having a huge military parade – either to celebrate his birthday, or the 250th anniversary of the US Army.

It depends which side you’re on.

The parade was either a massive success or a humiliating lame duck event.

It depends which side you’re on.

At the same time, the “No Kings” protests were taking place in cities all around the country. It was either the largest political protest in American history, or a massive anti-climactic non-starter.

It depends which side you’re on.

A “political assassin” allegedly killed two people in Minnesota on Saturday. He is either an ultra-right wing MAGA type, or a Democrat who worked for Tim Walz.

It depends which side you’re on.

I’m sure you get the point by now.

Noam Chomsky famously said…

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum

…and he was totally correct. But that has evolved. We’re well beyond that now. There is no longer a “spectrum” of permissible opinion, only a series of on/off switches and yes/no tickboxes. There is no longer debate, only name-calling and echo chambers.

The pick-a-side meta-narrative is all-encompassing and swamps every issue from every angle. Every breaking news story is immediately, violently and finally divided into two camps, and each camp is supplied with evidence to support their chosen point of view.

The divide is brutally policed, with each side seeing the other as barely-human functionaries of a life-destroying other.

More dangerously, not only do neither side debate the evidence of the other, but increasingly they can’t even see it. The other side probably lied and made it up, after all, that’s the kind of thing the other side does.

Keep reading

It is some years since I described Benjamin Netanyahu as the most dangerous man in West Asia. That was back when we heard all about the menace of the Assad regime in Damascus, the Beelzebub otherwise known as Iran’s supreme leader and other such unthinkably malign figures.

The Israeli prime minister just graduated. By any serious reckoning he is the world’s most dangerous man as of the shockingly reckless, altogether nihilist attacks he launched against the Islamic Republic in the early hours of Friday, June 13. I will get to Donald Trump’s place in the ratings in a sec.

In his initial announcement of Operation Rising Lion, Netanyahu asserted that Iran presents “an existential threat” to Israel and that he had no choice but to order an attack. This is nonsense, but we had better pay attention to the nonsense. With this loaded phrase, Bibi has effectively licensed the Zionist state to launch a nuclear weapon if these attacks fail to destroy all of the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programs, as seems likely. This is my read.

There is indeed an existential threat abroad as of last Friday. But it extends well beyond Iran and, indeed, West Asia. As the self-defined Jewish state’s long, dreadful record makes plain, it appears to recognize no limits to the violence it will inflict on others, its breaches of international law and the norms of the human cause, and the risks it will inflict on the world in the name of what amounts to a biblically authorized project of subjugation and domination.

To finish this point, the obsessed leader of a nuclear-armed nation never subjected to the terms of the Non–Proliferation Treaty has just attacked a non-nuclear nation it calls a mortal danger to Israel’s survival because of the nuclear weapons it does not possess. You do the math, as the expression goes. 

“Operation Rising Lion,” for the record, is a reference to the Prophecy of Balaam, an infidel with a very mixed record but who impressed the ancient Israelites with his exceptional powers of divination. In the Revised Standard Version of Numbers, 23:24, we find him saying, “Behold, the people shall rise up as a great lion, and lift up himself as a young lion: he shall not lie down until he eat of the prey, and drink the blood of the slain.” So does Bibi, who has the Palestinians down as evil Amalekites straight out of the Old Testament’s mythologies, once again state his purpose.

Israel and Iran are now at war, as one Tehrani told The New York Times after she listened to explosions and watched the flicker fires out her window last Friday evening. All is changed now. Netanyahu has craved this war for decades, always justifying his lust — a clinically psychotic lust, it is right to say — by way of endless lies and an apparently bottomless paranoia. These lies and this paranoia just put the world in danger of a global confrontation. We are all Iranians now: I am perfectly willing to say this.

As to President Trump and the American role in this, there is no need any longer for any of us to deceive ourselves. I continue to insist, against many who think otherwise, that the Zionist state is to be understood as a recklessly over-indulged client and not the Übermeister of U.S. policy. It is a complex dynamic, I mean to say, but the Zionist state just got done what the imperium wants in its broader ambition to “reshape the Middle East,” as the neoconservative cliques who direct U.S. policy have long put it. As I have noted previously in this space, borrowing from spookspeak, Israel does Washington’s wet work in West Asia.

Keep reading