Tag: national archives

With the recent release of the JFK files, Twitter—sorry, X—is ablaze with amateur detectives sifting through the document dump with more fervour than an especially high Shaggy devouring Scooby Snacks. The question on everyone’s lips: whodunnit? The answer remains elusive, given the lack of a definitive smoking gun, but what is clear is that the lone gunman theory is dubious at best. What is clear is that Kennedy had managed to upset a lot of important people, and the list of suspects remains extensive.

What’s curious, though, is the feeling of uneasiness, a sense of hesitation when considering Israel’s possible involvement in the ‘63 assassination. Discussions about the Mob, the CIA (arguably the same entity in post-war America), the military, and the Fed all feel acceptable within the Overton Window, yet raising the question of Israeli connections feels problematic and that it must be treated with exceptional delicacy. Why does any criticism of Israel provoke an instinctive sense of foreboding, as if any questioning could incite the next Holocaust, invite accusations of antisemitism, and lead to cancellation or social exile, akin to getting a swastika tattooed on one’s forehead? The answer is simple: we have been indoctrinated and propagandised by a Zionist movement determined to pursue its goals without scrutiny, protest, or backlash.

This influence permeates all tiers of society. The CIA, for example, specifically demanded that all mentions of Israeli intelligence be redacted from the JFK files. Thankfully, they weren’t. The documents indicate that Israel, like the other key players, had the means, motive, and possibly the opportunity. This bizarre exceptionalism extends beyond public discourse into the very corridors of power. Trump is now pressuring universities with threats of defunding, arguing that it is antisemitic to protest against genocide. The paradox is staggering: recognising the Holocaust as one of history’s greatest atrocities somehow inhibits criticism of an ongoing holocaust against a minority group, ironically within the nation-state of Israel. The bullied have become the bully. Even asserting that Palestinians are human beings deserving of self-determination is almost as dangerous as being displaced to a refugee camp in the West Bank. Imagine if Putin had deliberately targeted refugee camps, hospitals, and women and children. The media would double down on the Hitler comparisons, yet when Netanyahu does it, we get justifications, sanitised language, and deflection tactics designed to desensitise us to human suffering—so long as the victims are Muslim and not Jewish. Without eyewitness videos capturing the daily brutality in Gaza, the mainstream media would still have us believe that the IDF is the “most moral army in the world”. October 7th, of course, is the official start of history, with Hamas launching an entirely unprovoked and exceptionally evil attack that now somehow justifies the ongoing mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocents, mostly children.

Israeli exceptionalism is even evident in the way definitions are constructed. The Stockholm Declaration of 2000 by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), adopted by numerous governments, originally referenced only Jewish victims, omitting other groups targeted by the Nazis. Only recently were the Roma added as a secondary consideration, yet most people still equate the Holocaust solely with the murder of six million Jews, forgetting the communists, Slavs, intelligentsia, disabled people, and others who perished. It is also evident in political rhetoric: politicians can discuss Islamic extremism and Asian grooming gangs without fear of career-ending repercussions from Muslim lobby groups. But criticising Zionist influence in domestic politics? That is antisemitic. Al Jazeera produced an in-depth documentary exposing the role of Israeli lobbying in UK politics, demonstrating how a coalition of bad-faith actors—including figures from the UK military, intelligence services, and the Labour Party itself—helped neutralise the “Corbyn threat” due to his pro-Palestinian stance. Luckily, the British public, of course, opted for Boris Johnson instead, another pyrrhic victory in the ongoing destruction of the country to “Build Back Better’. That wasn’t sarcasm. Confessions of an Economic Hitman outlines what would have come next if Corbyn hadn’t been stopped by the PR wing of the establishment, aka the media—something confirmed by leaked emails between then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo and top UK army generals. No one critical of Israel, capitalism, or the poverty gap will ever be allowed to hold real power. That’s not how pseudo-democracy works. The system’s genius lies in making people believe they have agency while using every cog in the machine to propagandise them into voting against their own interests, vilifying any true opposition, and infiltrating grassroots movements to sabotage them from within. Thatcher being Blair’s hero was no coincidence. Nor was it a coincidence that NHS privatisation began under a Labour government.

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