SearchRecent comments
Democracy LinksMember's Off-site Blogs |
genocide is bad and genocide is fine....Bernie Sanders has been repeatedly uttering the phrase “Israel has a right to defend itself” on his “Fighting Oligarchy” tour with Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, which in the year 2025 can only be interpreted as blatant genocide apologia.
Caitlin Johnstone: ‘Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself’ Is Just a Slogan for Genocide
Israel does not have “a right to defend itself” against an occupied population in a giant concentration camp. Under international law it has a right to end the occupation, and that’s it. “Israel has a right to defend itself” is just a slogan people say when they want to justify supplying an ongoing genocide. At one point in the tour Sanders stood passively watching as police dragged off rally attendees who draped a Free Palestine flag over the US flag during his speech. He just awkwardly continued monologuing as their flag was confiscated and they were forcibly removed, even as the crowd booed and eventually began chanting “Free Palestine”. Sanders has been mixing his support for Israel in with periodic criticisms of Netanyahu and the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza, always taking care to make his criticisms about the behavior of Israel’s current leadership and not the nature of the racist apartheid state itself. Sanders is doing this for two reasons. Firstly, he is working to galvanize a big tent inclusive coalition of Democrats in opposition to Trump, and he wants that big tent to include people who think genocide is bad and people who think genocide is fine. He doesn’t want to offend the pro-genocide liberals. Secondly, Sanders is doing this because he himself is a Zionist. Like other liberal Zionists, Bernie Sanders upholds a vision of an Israel that has never, ever existed: one which remains an ethnostate dominated by Jews, but which conducts itself in a kind and just manner, without constantly murdering and abusing Palestinians. This iteration of the state of Israel is a fiction. An imaginary fantasyland, like Narnia. Everything about Israel is stacked against the possibility of such a status quo ever emerging, and Israel has always done everything it can to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. By pretending it is possible to have the Zionist entity and also have peace and justice, liberal Zionists help manufacture public consent for continuing to feed weapons to the genocidal apartheid state of Israel. When liberal Zionists want to support Israel’s actions, they talk about Israel as a nation, e.g. “Israel has a right to defend itself.” When liberal Zionists want to criticize Israel’s actions, they make it all about Netanyahu, e.g. “Netanyahu’s war machine.” The framing is that when Israel deserves our sympathy it’s a collective, but when Israel is naughty the responsibility lies solely at the feet of one bad apple. This ensures that the weapons can keep flowing to Israel (because Israel as a whole is virtuous and worthy of support) while the liberal Zionist still gets to wear their progressive humanitarian clothing (because they wagged their fingers at Netanyahu). And it’s just a complete and utter lie. Netanyahu didn’t create Israel’s genocidal tendencies, Israel’s genocidal tendencies created Netanyahu. His entire political career has been made possible by Israel’s collective racism and psychopathy upon which he rode into office. This is nothing other than the classic Obama-style tactic of using attractive progressivish language to advance the most destructive agendas of the US empire. In other words, it’s Democrats being Democrats. Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American husband Tim Foley. This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
|
User login |
supporting the hell.....
Craig Murray writes about the radical shift in Western philosophy…
Is This The World We Created?
Major parties in most Western “democracies” support Israel’s genocide. This represents a radical shift in philosophy and structural movement among governments of the worst kind.
It is all a part of the same phenomenon. Western governments actively assisting genocide in Gaza; attacks on benefits for the disabled; a deliberate official narrative of Russophobia; rampant Islamophobia boosting the rise of extreme right-wing parties and fuelled by government anti-immigrant rhetoric; an incredible accumulation of wealth by the ultra-rich; rampant erosion of freedoms of speech and expression.
It is not happenstance that all of this is happening at the same time. It represents a radical shift in Western philosophy.
This shift is not simple to trace because anti-intellectualism is an essential part of the new philosophy. Therefore, this philosophy does not really have its equivalent of Bertrand Russell or Noam Chomsky, whose careful exposition of societal analysis and ideals, based on a comprehensive understanding of previous philosophical discourse, is being superseded.
If there is a current equivalent, we may look at Bernard Henri Levy, whose rejection of collectivism and support of individual rights moved ever rightwards into support of raw capitalism, invasions of Muslim countries and now outspoken support for the genocide in Gaza. If you want to find an embodiment of the shift in Western philosophy, it might be him. But few any longer pay attention to academic intellectuals sitting in their studies. The now-threadbare mantle of “public intellectual” in the West has passed to lightweight figures like Jordan Peterson and populist Islamophobes like Douglas Murray.
Part of this is institutional. In my youth, Bertrand Russell or AJP Taylor were quite likely to turn up giving serious talks on the BBC, and John Pilger was the most celebrated documentary maker in British media. But now left-wing voices are effectively banned from mainstream media, whilst left-wing academics are most unlikely to progress in academia. Academia is itself now entirely run on a corporate model in the UK as throughout all the West.
A young Noam Chomsky would almost certainly be told by the University authorities to stick to linguistics and leave aside the philosophy and politics, or not get tenure. Chomsky was already a renowned linguist in 1967, when he published his breakthrough essay “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals”. Essentially a call for academics to support the protest movement, a young professor who published it today would almost certainly get suspended if not sacked and even, in today’s climate, quite possibly arrested.
The deportations of students from the USA who have broken no law but protested against genocide; the fines there on universities for allowing free speech; the deportations of EU citizens from Germany for speaking out on Palestine; the police raid on the Quaker meeting house in London and the widespread “terrorism” charges against peaceful journalists – these are just examples of a wave of repression sweeping the major Western states.
They are all linked. It is a structural movement in government of the worst kind. It can only be compared to the wave of fascism that swept much of Europe in the 1930s.
The great irony, of course, is that it is the Western destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and the Western destabilisation of Syria that led to the massive wave of immigration to Europe that caused the rise of the far right. Over 1.5 million Syrian “refugees” were granted asylum in the EU, because they claimed to be on the anti-Assad side, which the West was supporting. AfD is very much a result of Merkel’s decision to accept 600,000 Syrian refugees in Germany.
Fascinatingly, now their side has “won” and a Western-backed government has been installed in Damascus, less than 1% of these refugees have returned to Syria. Despite the official anti-immigrant narratives of almost all Western governments, there seems to be no attempt to suggest that they might return. Indeed, those Western politicians most keen on deporting immigrants are the least likely to suggest that the reliably Zionist anti-Assad Syrians should leave, even though those same politicians portray Syria under al Jolani as a liberal paradise and rush to give it money.
The neo-con immigration narrative in Europe is peculiarly complex and flexible. Effectively, immigrants viewed as on the West’s side in its wars (Sunni Syrians, Ukrainians) have an open door.
Mass immigration to Europe is therefore a direct result of imperialist foreign policy, and that plays out in complex ways, with the West’s victims arriving against official disapproval and the West’s clients arriving with official approval.
Equally, the economic dislocation and large rise in inflation which also has strengthened the populist right, is itself exaggerated by Western foreign policy. The proxy war in Ukraine is largely responsible for the step change in Europe’s energy prices, with the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline a key factor in the major struggles of German manufacturing industry.
Incredibly, for a year, the entire Western media and political class tried to enforce the lie that Russia destroyed its own pipeline – just as they claimed Hamas blew up the first of the dozens of hospitals and health centres destroyed by Israel.
We come back to Gaza, as all serious discussion must at present. I cannot come to terms with the fact that the takeover of the political Establishment by Zionist interests – itself a consequence of the massive growth of the comparative wealth of the ultra-rich – is making it possible for the most brutal genocide possible to happen before the eyes of the world, with active support from the Western establishment.
It is not that the people do not want to stop it. It is that there is no mechanism connecting the popular will to the instruments of government. The major parties all support Israel’s genocide in almost all the Western “democracies”.
It has become impossible to deny the intention of Genocide now. Israel has stepped up its killing of children to dozens every day, is openly executing medics and destroying all healthcare facilities, is bombing desalination plants and is blockading all food.
The Zionist narrative on social media has shifted from denial of genocide to justification of genocide.
I simply cannot understand the mainstream tolerance of this Holocaust. I am living in an age where the power structures and social narratives I do not recognise as part of a societal organisation to which I can consent to belong. It is the British Labour Party which is actively supporting genocide whilst targeting the most vulnerable at home for cuts in income. It is the EU which is doing everything possible to promote World War 3 and transforming into a militarily aggressive organisation of Nazi leanings.
The UK, US and other first-world nations are radically cutting overseas aid to provide money for imperialist military aggression. The broadly social democratic consensus of the Western world in my youth involved much dull compromise, but it was infinitely better and more hopeful than this Hell we are creating.
https://www.activistpost.com/decoding-the-zionist-narrative-from-denial-to-justification/
READ FROM TOP.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
a happy day.....
Nehme Hamie
Apr, 17/2025
Washington – Perhaps the day Josep Borrell left his post as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy was the happiest day of his life. He declared that Europe was morally failing by its inability to do anything to stop the open massacre in Gaza, which qualifies as a war crime for which the West sought to prosecute Russia and its president with the outbreak of the Ukraine war. What is happening in Ukraine is nothing compared to what is happening in Gaza. Perhaps Borrell, a loyal European, has comforted their governments and given them some respite, after his continued existence became impossible. He declared that Europe is begging Benjamin Netanyahu, and there is no greater humiliation than that, while he is not listening because he has Washington’s blessing for what he is doing in all its atrocities.
It is true that the world has witnessed many wars accompanied by violations and crimes, but we are not witnessing a war in Gaza. There is no army fighting in Gaza, and there are no extended, interconnected wars, these are some of their painful chapters. Rather, the whole world is living in peace and quiet, while an area the size of some of the neighborhoods of a major city, with the highest population density in the world, and on a flat land on sand with no hills or mountains, and the most modern American planes flying over it, fresh from the factories, equipped with the largest and most destructive bombs, plowing the land, collapsing buildings, and reaping the lives of children, women, and the elderly without mercy and without respite, and the world is watching, some of it crying, some justifying, and some demonstrating, and the Arabs are asleep, appealing to the West, and they are, as the Qatari Foreign Minister and former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim said, sheep who do nothing.
The West that the Arabs are appealing to is the same West that granted Palestine to the Zionist project a century ago. It is the West that treated the occupying entity in Palestine as an extension of Western civilization, and as the most important democracy in this East. It is the West that preached democracy as a reference point that has no place for aggression, human rights violations, and war crimes. These are the diseases of barbarism perpetrated by nomadic and backward peoples based on bloody solutions, as the West and its culture say. And here is its civilizational model in the East revealing the true image of the West, as long as this West does not deny its paternity of this criminal racist entity.
Europe lies submissive at the gates of America, pleading with Netanyahu. Its streets, saturated with humanity, chant for Palestine, while the rulers have closed their ears to listening. As for America, which was founded on the extermination of the indigenous population for the benefit of immigrant settlers, it blesses itself for repeating what it did. The question is, what remains of Western democracy?
https://www.theinteldrop.org/2025/04/17/political-commentary-the-moral-decline-of-democracies-in-the-west/
READ FROM TOP.
YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.
Gus Leonisky
POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.
SEE ALSO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDJditWFIFk