The Difference Between ISIS and Israel August 19, 2014

In the first days of the Israeli assault on Gaza, some asked ‘Why the news concentration on Israel’.  Why not Syria, or ISIS etc. ?    This became one of the talking points of Israeli apologists who argued that it  is unjust – some suggested it reflected growing anti-semitism in Europe.   But at least we were making some progress: Israel was now being viewed on the same level as other backward, racist, fundamentalist movements or pariah states.    It is a sign that the ‘oasis of democracy is a sea of savagery’ myth is getting threadbare. Israel keeps pushing that myth but struggles in the face of growing press and social media focus.

So, what are the differences between Israel and  ISIS ?

Well, for one, ISIS thankfully does not have diplomatic representation here in Dublin.    ISIS doesn’t have an ambassador and his wife down in Ballsbridge peddling racism and Jewish supremacy. Here in Dublin we have a pair of bigots who argue that Israel is fighting for “us” against “them’.     Using racist stereotypes, the embassy tells us that were it not for Israel, Ireland and Europe would be overrun by Jihadi hordes.   (Strange that they are concerned about us, as Mrs. Bodai recently referred to the Irish as “anti-Semitic heathen hordes”).   In doing so they have become a global laughing stock – although that term minimises their sinister role. It is no wonder that there is a petition going around trying to put pressure on Enda Kenny to throw Boaz Modai and his Madame Ngu out. They are also a source of shame and concern to that dwindling, endangered group: the Israeli left.  It is staggering, however, to think that this locker room racism and barracks bigotry is coming from a diplomatic mission.   But sadly violent racist rhetoric is often be heard amongst the mainstream. Calls to send Gaza back to the Middle Ages or kicking the population out can heard from mainstream members of today’s Knesset.

Nor is my government complicit in ISIS atrocity the way it is with Israeli politicide. ISIS does not sit in the UN pretending to be a civilised nation. When we cut off diplomatic relations with the State of Israel, then things can change. Until then Israel’s PR machine deserves our attention.  And, as we can see from Dr Luntz’s manual, it is still very effective at peddling the con.  Israel has a far more evolved public relations machine than ISIS. It knows it is not good PR to go around beheading people in public. And when it does shoot innocent people who are trying to drag family members out of their bombed homes and then finishes them off as they lie in rubble, it doesn’t promulgate youtube clips of its actions.   Israel, as the Dr. Luntz manual reminds us, is fighting an information war.  It used to be very good at peddling the con. But the more it is exposed, the cruder it gets. The crudeness is part of a growing lack of sophistication as opposition and dissidence is stomped on. The crudeness is a sign that Israel is on the defensive.

Photo: Moamar Awad

The “Why us, not Syria?’ line showed the cracks in the con job. That’s the last line of defence before admitting the game is up.   ISIS does it by sword. Israel by drone. But the end result for the poor ******* on the wrong side is the same.

Israel must be stopped before it achieves its objective of bombing the Palestinians into an ISIS state of mind. It is a testament to the Palestinians’ sophistication as a culture that this has not yet happened. But in the despicable prison lab that is Gaza, in a brutalised world without the semblance of hope, in a world of humiliation and constant daily indignity, frightening mutations can happen. Israel wants vicious jihadi hordes to justify its vicious barbaric repression. Israel panics at the sight of moderation. That is why Israel originally supported Hamas. And that is why – after the emergence of the  recent Hamas Fatah reconciliation – we are witnessing the IDF slaughtering its way through Gaza. Israel prefers this bellicose status quo to the prospects of giving up land. Israel has never ever wanted to give up land. And Israel want to ensure it creates facts on the ground that means it never can. The Neo Cons made the Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו visions a reality when they deliberately tore Iraq apart and rendered it into a set of warring sectarian factions. The next step was supposed to be Iran. Once the grunts left Iraq where they would have been at Iran’s mercy. Benny screamed ‘onwards to Tehran’. But the brutalisation of Iraq gave birth to mutations like ISIS.  And now we have both Tel Aviv and its bastard twin ISIS engaged in genocidal activity. But curiously we only have talk of humanitarian aid for the Christians stranded on the mountain where Noah’s ark was said to have been built. Down below circle Rumsfeld’s twisted barbaric offspring. And no-one comes to the aid of the Gazans,

Israel prefers a bellicose status quo to land yielding peace.

Israel has never ever been prepared to give up land.

Israeli apologists will point to Gaza.

Israel gave up Gaza.

But the Gaza ‘withdrawal’ was a mere cosmetic move where Israel merely changed its role from repressive occupier to brutal prison guard.

The IDF moved from one side of a wall to another. Locking “in” instead of locking “down”.

Israel strives to replicate what it has done with its own state, that is, to create sufficient “fact” on the ground that it becomes indisputable. If a couple of million Palestinians are in the way, so what.

They have a choice, it says.

Submit, leave or die.

This is why Israel sees itself as innocent of the crime of genocide: the Palestinians don’t face certain death. No they have the luxury of leaving. Or submitting.

It’s very like ISIS with their variants on ‘Cough up, convert or die.”

Furthermore, Israel is at pains to point out that Palestinians live ‘freely’ within the State of Israel itself and even can participate in the body politic.

Yes, they can live as second-class citizens in an increasingly intolerant racist society. And their political leaders often stand accused of ‘treason’ for representing their voters.

Israel has come up with a more “telegenic – as Benny would say -” form of genocide and that’s politicide – the attack on all constructs that bring people together as a nation, that give people identity, pride and hope.

Under the cover of endless peace talks, it steadfastly pursues this objective. An objective that clearly explains attacks on schools, hospitals, power plants and universities.

So why do I agitate about Israel?  Because the West  is complicit in its silence. America enables the whole brutal show with its aid. And Europe either acquiesces or cheers on. Much to the horror of a growing percentage of citizens.

America could call a halt to this whole quasi-genocidal show. But it has neither the courage nor the moral integrity to do so.   That can change. Political parties may seem paralysed but the people’s view is changing. It’s almost 10 years since Pulitzer Prize winning Middle East reporter, the late Richard Ben Kramer wrote his New York Times best seller ‘How Israel Lost.’ Kramer chronicled how US Jews were becoming increasingly alienated from the extreme policies of modern Israel. Change may be tragically slow. But it is happening. Look at the series of Latin American countries that have just recently broken off diplomatic relations with Israel.

Personally I am fascinated by propaganda and love nothing more than a good fight.  Writing in Dublin Ireland, there is very little one can do to combat the threat of ISIS. But Israel is different. Political support, or the lack thereof, matters to Israel. So it makes sense to create political pressure. Highlighting what is happening to Gaza informs people and makes them more likely to lobby. The boycott of South Africa took time for it to hit a critical mass.

Kevin Barrington  19.8.2014

Images published by Israeli Embassies – July 2014

 

 

 

Dear Palestine July 26, 2014

Merry Christmas Mister Sand Men
Stay hidden in your pods
I’m dreaming of white phosphorous
A present from our gods
A blazing western charity
That burns down canvas streets
High calibre instalments so
Tear off the linen sheets
A payload of democracy
From a war we didn’t start
That arrow that you tossed at us
We’ll thrust it through your heart.

Chorus
You’d think you would be grateful,
It’s for your kith and sin
We wash away the antiquity
And cleanse you from your kin.

If we step upon a serpent
It grows a thousand heads
Had to build a quiet camp for you
But still your hatred spreads
We lost a generation
Those deaths aren’t on your hands
But the cold corpse of my holocaust
Still wanders through these sands.
My righteousness is written on
A withered desert scroll
In blood upon the back of it
Is etched your body toll.

Chorus
You’d think you would be grateful,
It’s for your kith and sin
We wash away the antiquity
And cleanse you from your kin.

The junk food logos shelter us
And keep the world in line
They pay for two-faced satellites
With pop-stars on its mind
Humanity might care for you
But their leaders stay aloof
They trade a blind eye for an eye
And we take a tooth for truth
Your friends are only occupied
By their private revolutions
There’ll be no spring in Palestine
From a UN Resolution

Chorus
You’d think you would be grateful,
It’s for your kith and sin
We wash away the antiquity
And cleanse you from your kin.

 

5intheface   25th July 2014

 

Israel and Terror July 26, 2014

I don’t like this thing of equating Israel with terrorism. Boyd Barrett calling it a ‘terrorist state’ last weekend and loads of other instances all over the place. WTF is ‘state-terrorism’ that isn’t already war, occupation, invasion, humiliation, starvation, colonialism and everything that goes on already? Is there some acceptable or legit ethic cleansing? State-Terror isn’t used for Cromwell or own history, not for any imperial project and what is state terror to the Palestinians when it isn’t even their state?

It falls into this unhelpful post-911 idea of terror. All violence is now terrorism for some reason or can be label so and where does that come from. We have all sorts of ‘insurgents’, ‘separatists’, ‘rebels’ in the news but they are all interchangeable with terrorist depending on what way the wind is blowing and I don’t think this kind of framing/rhetoric – that really took hold during the Bush era – is something we should bolster. Terrorist violence uses fear to achieve goals because fear is seen as most effective weapon available. Israel don’t have anything approaching a weapon shortage. Keeping US politicians or anyone who might dissent in check is one thing, there is fear there for sure but Israel don’t care if people in Gaza are afraid they just want to kill Palestinians and take their land.

And something else that bothers me is inseparable. Who gets labelled terrorist and who doesn’t in this day and age? Not Breivik, not school shooters not any shooters unless they are non-white. Sticking the banner of terror on Israel like some Extra Bad Terrible Thing beyond what they are already doing has connotations of saying they are just as bad as People of colour or more precisely Muslims, those Other people. There is no getting away from how the label of terrorism has been racialised and we must be mindful of that when people have dubious ideas of acceptable and unacceptable violence.

 

Dr. FIVE  25th July 2014

 

Those Marching Feet… July 7, 2014

Working-class British nationalists (aka ‘Loyalists’) in Northern Ireland are openly talking about violence working, and imputing that they will be ‘forced’ to use violence if they don’t get their way on the Ardoyne Orange Order march issue.

They’re also getting ambiguously-coded support from the political representatives of the wider British nationalist community (aka ‘Unionists’) in NI for these threats. That’s what the phrase ‘graduated response’ really means.

‘Graduated’ does not mean either ‘proportionate’ or even ‘calibrated by people with a third-level degree’. It is a weasel word covering for ‘a series of discrete levels of organised violence, starting at widespread public disorder all the way to a campaign of lethal terrorism, against all those we deem to be our cultural, political and institutional foes.’

These British nationalists are 100% correct about the effectiveness of violence to achieve political ends, anybody’s political ends. That’s why state power moves might and main to secure and maintain a monopoly on the use of violence everywhere its sovereignty extends. It’s not always reliable, but it usually is. The Northern Ireland jurisdiction would never have existed but for the threats and reality of political violence on their forefathers’ part starting from the early 1880s right through to the early 1920s.

British nationalist violence brought down Sunningdale back in the 1970s. In 1996, the killing of taxi driver Michael McGoldrick was part of a NI-wide campaign of British nationalist violence and terror which forced an O.O. parade down Portadown’s Garvaghy Road totally against the will of the local residents. The killing of the three Quinn boys from Ballymoney in 1998 was an act of British nationalist violence too far, that horrified the great majority of NI residents, including many British nationalists. Yet, the O.O.’s spokesmen sought to deflect its responsibility in that matter (as did much of institutional British nationalism in NI in other ways: for instance the UVF’s silence at the time re responsibility was telling) and impute that the Quinn’s catholic uncle was the guilty party.

That (alas uncommon) instance of the failure of a campaign of violence to achieve its aims has meant that the loyal orders have not marched down that road since 1998. Even so, the resort to violence and threats of violence seems to be a reflex response of most British nationalists in NI when there is effective political opinion and action deployed against their triumphalist desires.

I’m no fan of Irish nationalism either. Yes I am Irish and I am comfortable enough living with that cultural identity, but my politics are anarchist and socialist/ communist and furthermore I want to live in a world where our common humanity is the identity we all cherish above all others. But I recognise that throughout modern history, Irish nationalism has, unlike its British counterpart (which has used the violence of the state and paramilitary auxiliaries as a first resort), most often employed violence as a last resort after other peaceful methods had patently failed. Within the broad political community of Irish nationalism there has been a political discourse about political violence – whether it is justified either globally or specifically, what political violence does to the politics of the wider nationalist movement, and what sort of political grounding/authorisation is required in order to employ it – going on for a very long time indeed, since before Parnell’s time at least. There is little or nothing of a comparable self-awareness that I can see in all British nationalist circles over the same period of time right up to the present, either on this island or on the island of Britain. British violence is good violence, even when it commits atrocities. It took the British state nearly 40 years to merely apologise to the relatives of the Bloody Sunday victims, and that state still refuses to co-operate fully/at all when it comes to investigating the Ballymurphy Massacre and the Dublin/Monaghan Bombings, to name but two war crimes in which that state is clearly implicated.

The 26-county Irish state doesn’t behave much better when it wrongs its own citizens, but it does not view such citizens (or their kin/legal representatives) seeking to vindicate their human rights as implacable opponents of the state and its political dispensation. Furthermore, I have no awareness of the Irish state knowingly committing or actively colluding in acts of terror outside its jurisdiction in pursuit of its domestic state security agenda. If you have knowledge or claim of different, please bring it up and let’s discuss it.

I do fear deeply for what may happen over this ‘marching season’ for in Scotland the UK state is in existential peril because of the cumulative successes of the independence movement/Yes campaign in the Independence Referendum debate, and this dawning realisation for British nationalists of all locations, classes and stripes is profoundly destabilising. British nationalism is raging against the dying of its light (and hegemonic right), and a growing tide of opinion in Ireland and Scotland is revulsed by its violent domination of political discourse in both countries for far too long. Expect trouble, very serious violent trouble on the part of British nationalists, and don’t be one bit surprised if the UK state gives in to it, or even orchestrates a significant portion of it.

It is right, as some have suggested, that republicans/other Irish nationalists should not respond to British nationalist provocations, because the loyalists and the unionist parties alike are spoiling for violence, as they think it will create the necessary chaos for their nasty ludicrous dream of ‘re-partition’, prompt open UK military intervention, collapse the suspension of major political violence that’s miscalled ‘the peace process’, and ultimately bring back the halcyon days of Stormont Mk I. Unfortunately for unionists and loyalists, the laws of thermodynamics imply that you can’t re-create the past exactly as it was, even in microcosm, so they’re pissing against the wind out of sheer wilful ignorance of how the universe works, which is ironic since the great physicist William Thomson (aka Baron Kelvin) was an Ulsterman of their own stock. Also, ‘No Surrenderism’ and the inability to see beyond their own sectarian fences will destroy ‘Protestant Ulster’ as a viable cultural complex, the good along with the bad and the manifestly ugly. It’s a tragedy that’s been going on since 1912 and the foundation of the UVF and its arming in 1914: Unionism has refused since to meaningfully negotiate a shared culture and politics for this island with all the others who live here regardless of ideological affiliation, and all that time they had useful opportunities for serious influence over such matters were they only willing to cut reasonable deals and drop the supremacism.

The UK’s erstwhile status as a world power gave British nationalists the political cover to shout the cultural odds for the rest of us on these islands without any meaningful budging on British nationalism’s part, and these fools believe that that balance of political and cultural power in the Atlantic Archipelago is going to last forever. By the time the penny drops with Unionism/British nationalism in NI (and in Britain too), its community will have almost nothing of value to bargain with and their overall influence in Ireland (even up there) will be marginal at best. It’s a tragedy almost entirely of their own making – choices made and not made by Unionist leaderships, roads walked and not walked by Orangeism, and no-one to shout ‘Hang on a minute!’ for fear of being ‘Lundied’.

And finally to add, when a mob of people are rabidly trying to burn down the street you live on, as happened when the last ‘troubles’ broke out, it’s hard to exercise restraint, possibly too hard. The violence in NI this summer could potentially be extreme, as British nationalists really need their Irish counterparts to join the eschatological tango. And there’s any number of loyalist nutjobs out there praying for the ‘End Times’ thinking they’re some kind of political ‘Second Coming’ – for instance take a look at Jamie Bryson, the walking farce who wants to follow on from the Carsonian/Craigite/Paisleyite tragedy.

 

Kid Ryder 6th July 2014

(Extracted and edited from the thread of the same title on the Political World forum)