Jews who had survived the Holocaust, like British officers who had survived Japanese POW camps, or Russian intellectuals who had spent time in the Gulags, had seen terrible things which shone a harsh light upon what Agamben would call 'bare life', where simply staying alive took priority over any way of living which culture and civilization has accustomed them to. Some such survivors had literary ability. Thus, there were some quite readable memoirs penned by them which gained a more than local currency. True, others who had no similar experience, muscled in on this profitable trade. In the case of Ashkenazi survivors, for cultural and religious reasons, a certain hyperbolic style, with echoes of the Old Testament or of Talmudic Sages, crept into this branch of literature. But it was merely a literary affectation. It meant nothing in itself and had little impact.
In 1978, NBC screened a four part miniseries, starring Meryl Streep, which is credited with bringing the word 'Holocaust' into popular usage. It also had a big impact on West Germans precisely because it was sanitized, shmaltzy, and had the imprimatur of Hollywood. However, it led to no great change in how Israel was perceived. Arabs were not greatly liked because of Palestinian terrorism and the two big oil shocks. What changed was that non-Jews suddenly began to identify with what happened to Jews in Hitler's Germany, in the same way that reading the Biggles books had led kids around the world to identify with dashing pilots belonging to the RAF, or watching cowboy movies had led to an interest in Red Indians.
Pankaj Mishra who deeply misunderstands the India where he grew up, may be forgiven for having no clue about how and why the West came to take an interest in 'the Shoah'. Perhaps, finding that the market for shitting on Hindu India has dried up, Mishra has shifted his attention to Jewish Israel. He writes in the LRB of
The Shoah after Gaza
The Shoah involved much more killing than the Naqba. Even adding in the death-toll of a hundred Gaza wars, this fundamental fact won't change. Thus, those who think killing Jews is a bad thing will consider the Shoah a justification of Israel's maintaining an H-bomb arsenal to wipe out anyone who tries to wipe it out. As for the Palestinians- they simply don't matter. It is hilarious that these Hanafi Sunni Arabs are sacrificing themselves for the greater glory of Shia Iran.
In 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry
who published a book on suicide in 1976
came across press reports of the systematic torture of Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons.
He was outraged because he preferred unsystematic torture. Anyway, by then, the whole world knew that Mossad was assassinating Israel's enemies all over the place.
Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo,
what a waste of time! Killing is quicker and cheaper. No wonder the Nazis lost the war. Still, I suppose you were safer torturing people or running a death camp than fighting on the Eastern Front.
and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable.
Also those who are killed remain killed and those who take a shit remain free of specific turds.
Like many survivors of Nazi death camps, Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the 1960s.
Once Israel was kicking ass, people of Jewish heritage thought maybe their religion or ethnicity wasn't something to be ashamed of.
He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state
i.e. the Communists behind the Iron Curtain and their 'useful idiot' fellow travelers. The Stasi were helping the PLO & Carlos the Jackal and so forth. Incidentally, some of the older Communists involved were Jewish.
as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists.
African and Indian intellectuals, of that period, could see with their own eyes that White Racists were using the language of Human Rights and Democratic values to attack the leaders of ex-colonies. Obviously, they needed to pay some darkie- like Mishra- to do it on their behalf, otherwise they'd have been laughed at.
Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state.
Fuck was his 'solidarity' worth? He'd just written a book saying how it was totes cool to top yourself.
In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me
by committing suicide?
in the radical condemnation of systematic torture.
cause plain garden variety condemnation just won't do.
Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’
So just fucking top yourself already. Your existential commitment to continuing to exist must end if someone somewhere tortures someone.
Améry was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis in 1977 of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister.
So what? He'd have topped himself anyway because he had written a book about how topping yourself is totes cool and rad.
Begin, who had organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel.
Nonsense! Ben Gurion was just as 'maximalist' as Jabotinsky. Their 1934 'London agreement' was rejected by the Labor Federation. The one thing, however, all Jews could agree on was that they were superior to the natives and must rule the roost once the Brits fucked off.
He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories.
Allon & Eshkol started the settlements. This involved 'assaulting Arabs'. On the other hand it is true that Eshkol and Godla Meier frequently praised Hitler and denied there had been any Holocaust.
Mishra is as ignorant of Palestine as he is of India. I would like to hear his account of the Rishi Sunak years when Britain brutally assaulted and tortured Muslims, Christians, Jews and Homosexuals in exactly the manner that Marlene Dietrich predicted when she sang Lili Marlene.
In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims.
No. Lots of people who escaped from the Camps or who were part of the Resistance turned up to fight for Israel in 1948. Moreover, the Shoah was the lever with which to prise valuable reparation payments out of West Germany.
Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, initially saw Shoah survivors as ‘human debris’, claiming that they had survived only because they had been ‘bad, harsh, egotistic’.
He didn't like new-comers who might challenge his authority. But, he considered the Ashkenazi the best human material for Israel. He wasn't keen on Mizrahis.
It was Ben-Gurion’s rival Begin, a demagogue from Poland,
just like Ben-Gurion
who turned the murder of six million Jews into an intense national preoccupation,
Both Begin and Ben-Gurion were fighting the Palestinians in Palestine when Hitler rose to power. Ben-Gurion was more moderate than Begin for tactical reasons
and a new basis for Israel’s identity.
No. That already existed. The Brits wanted out and knew that a Palestinian state would not be viable. The question was whether a Jewish canton would be willing to cross-subsidize Palestinian cantons or whether partition was inevitable. The answer was that Israel's ability to defend itself would determine its right to exist. The Palestinians couldn't rule themselves. If an Arab coalition exterminated the Jews, that coalition could decide how to carve up Palestine.
Banging on about how your people got slaughtered aint smart till you have nukes and a kick ass air-force. Why put ideas into your enemies' heads?
The Israeli establishment began to produce and disseminate a very particular version of the Shoah that could be used to legitimise a militant and expansionist Zionism.
No. The only thing that 'legitimizes' kicking ass is actually kicking ass. Its no good wailing about how everybody fucked you in the ass if everybody is still taking turns sodomizing you.
Améry noted the new rhetoric and was categorical about its destructive consequences for Jews living outside Israel. That Begin, ‘with the Torah in his arm and taking recourse to biblical promises’, speaks openly of stealing Palestinian land
which had already been stolen in 1948 and 1956 and 1967 by Labor administrations. Begin swapped land for peace.
‘alone would be reason enough’, he wrote, ‘for the Jews in the diaspora to review their relationship to Israel’.
By topping themselves- right?
Améry pleaded with Israel’s leaders to ‘acknowledge that your freedom can be achieved only with your Palestinian cousin, not against him’.
More particularly if you top yourself. Your cousins will be very happy.
Five years later, insisting that Arabs were the new Nazis
Sir Anthony Eden thought Nasser was the new Hitler. The Grand Mufti was a pal of Hitler's who committed war-crimes. Mishra is simply ignorant.
and Yasser Arafat the new Hitler,
to be fair, many believed Arafat was related to the Grand Mufti at that time
Begin assaulted Lebanon.
In alliance with the Christians for whom that State was created.
By the time Ronald Reagan
ran away from Lebanon after a suicide bomber killed a bunch of US marines? No. It was a little before that.
accused him of perpetrating a ‘holocaust’
Reagan knew that word because he had watched Meryl Streep in a recent NBC mini-series. Begin said Reagan used the word during an angry telephone call.
and ordered him to end it, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had killed tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese and obliterated large parts of Beirut.
Which nobody gave a shit about. Reagan's greatness was to use tough love to get Israel to reform its economy.
In his novel Kapo (1993), the Serbian-Jewish author Aleksandar Tišma
who, living in Tito's Yugoslavia, had to tug the forelock to Arafat. Incidentally, NAM equated Zionism with Apartheid in 1975.
captures the revulsion many survivors of the Shoah felt at the images coming out of Lebanon: ‘Jews, his kinsmen, the sons and grandsons of his contemporaries, former inmates of the camps, stood in tank turrets and drove, flags waving, through undefended settlements, through human flesh, ripping it apart with machine-gun bullets, rounding up the survivors in camps fenced off with barbed wire.’
Tisma had to run away from Milosevic's Serbia at about this time. Had he stuck around he'd have witnessed worse atrocities than any the Israelis committed. He settled in France, which, of course, has a great track record regarding the Jews.
Primo Levi,
whose death was ruled a suicide.
who had known the horrors of Auschwitz at the same time as Améry and also felt an emotional affinity to the new Jewish state, quickly organised an open letter of protest and gave an interview in which he said that ‘Israel is rapidly falling into total isolation ... We must choke off the impulses towards emotional solidarity with Israel to reason coldly on the mistakes of Israel’s current ruling class. Get rid of that ruling class.’
Also, why not top yourself? Your anti-Semitic cousins will be greatly chuffed.
In several works of fiction and non-fiction, Levi had meditated not only on his time in the death camp and its anguished and insoluble legacy, but also on the ever present threats to human decency and dignity.
Those threats are only present if your army and police are shit.
He was especially incensed by Begin’s exploitation of the Shoah.
Israelis were incensed by Begin's military failure in Lebanon.
Two years later, he argued that ‘the centre of gravity of the Jewish world must turn back, must move out of Israel and back into the diaspora.’
Where Jews should very kindly top themselves to the great delight of various anti-Semitic cousins.
Misgivings of the kind expressed by Améry and Levi
who topped themselves
are condemned as grossly antisemitic today.
No. Nobody gives a fuck. Everybody virtue signals more particularly if they are going to top themselves.
It’s worth remembering that many such re-examinations of Zionism and anxieties about the perception of Jews in the world were incited among survivors and witnesses of the Shoah by Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory and its manipulative new mythology.
Mythologies don't matter. Kicking ass does. Mishra doesn't get this.
Yeshayahu Leibowitz,
who believed in God. He didn't top himself. Cousins were not pleased.
a theologian who won the Israel Prize in 1993, was already warning in 1969 against the ‘Nazification’ of Israel.
Which was cool. Nazis are scary mofos. I am very tolerant of people who describe me as a remorseless sex-machine intent on bringing vast numbers of Super-Models to multiple orgasms. I should be condemned because, sooner or later, I am going to reduce the entire Super-Model population to a state of sexual thraldom. What if I use these poor besotted girls to seize power over the galaxy? No black hole would be safe from my ginormous penis.
In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion:
which begins by mentioning Nazis
the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’.
I might end up fucking the giant black hole at the center of this galaxy so vigorously that it experiences orgasm upon orgasms after which it is bound to squirt out supermassive plumes of energy which might destroy the entire multiverse. That is why it is urgent that intellectuals write articles for the LRB about the threat to the Cosmos posed by my ginormous cock.
Evron urged caution, too, against Israel’s (then new and ardent) supporters in the Jewish American population.
If Israel goes down, at the margin, Jews everywhere will be vulnerable. It doesn't matter if support is ardent or grudging. What matters is if it is worth having. Israel is worth something to the Jewish diaspora. Israel's Jewish enemies are worth nothing to anybody. Virtue signaling is not support. It is an attempt to turn the focus upon one's own angelic nature. I frequently praised certain Fields Medal winners because they had at least shown the courage to pursue certain ideas whose true import, it genuinely grieves me to say, their lack of Socioproctological training and their deficient commitment to Anti-Masturbation Ideology, prevented them from understanding. The fact is, all higher mathematics is concerned exclusively with proving that my cock is ginormous and presents a clear and present danger to the anal cherry of the Black Hole at the Center of our galaxy.
For them, he argued, championing Israel had become ‘necessary because of the loss of any other focal point to their Jewish identity’
i.e. they didn't go to synagogue. Indeed, some didn't even have Chinese food at Christmas.
– indeed, so great was their existential lack, according to Evron, that they did not wish Israel to become free of its mounting dependence on Jewish American support.
The trouble is, Israel has grown less and less dependent on American support- Jewish or otherwise. What we don't know is if the West can retain any foothold in the MENA if it abandons Israel. The Jewish state, however, can sponsor terror and enter complicated systems of alliances just like some other States in the region.
They need to feel needed. They also need the ‘Israeli hero’ as a social and emotional compensation in a society in which the Jew is not usually perceived as embodying the characteristics of the tough manly fighter.
That stereotype died long ago.
Thus, the Israeli provides the American Jew with a double, contradictory image – the virile superman, and the potential Holocaust victim – both of whose components are far from reality.
Fifty years ago, maybe. Not now.
Zygmunt Bauman,
a Communist driven out of Poland during the 1968 crisis. He got a teaching gig in Israel before getting a better one in the UK. He had previously studied at the LSE and could publish in English.
the Polish-born Jewish philosopher and refugee from Nazism
and post-War Communist 'political officer'.
who spent three years in Israel in the 1970s before fleeing its mood of bellicose righteousness,
he accepted a more prestigious, better paid, job in the UK.
despaired of what he saw as the ‘privatisation’
Mrs. Thatcher was very evil. She did 'privatization'. Bauman was against the sort of 'globalization' which enable post-Communist Poland to rise rapidly.
of the Shoah by Israel and its supporters. It has come to be remembered, he wrote in 1988, ‘as a private experience of the Jews, as a matter between the Jews and their haters’, even as the conditions that made it possible were appearing again around the world.
Denouncing Israel remains a private experience but, if you can make a bit of money, why not do it as publicly as possible?
Such survivors of the Shoah, who had been plunged from a serene belief in secular humanism
so not dudes like Baumann who enthusiastically identified the wrong sort of Pole for Soviet death squads.
into collective insanity, intuited that the violence they had survived – unprecedented in its magnitude – wasn’t an aberration in an essentially sound modern civilisation. Nor could it be blamed entirely on a hoary prejudice against Jews. Technology and the rational division of labour
Capitalism!
had enabled ordinary people to contribute to acts of mass extermination with a clear conscience, even with frissons of virtue, and preventive efforts against such impersonal and available modes of killing required more than vigilance against antisemitism.
So there you have it. Unless we destroy Capitalism, everybody will actually be a Nazi torturing Jews unless, of course they are a Jew torturing Palestinians. Americans torturing Arabs, however, are okay.
When I recently turned to my books to prepare this piece,
why not just cut and paste from previous articles?
I found I’d already underlined many of passages I quote here. In my diary there are lines copied from George Steiner
who would have us believe he was actually fighting Nazis in Paris when he was actually a school boy attending the Lycee in New York.
(‘the nation-state bristling with arms is a bitter relic, an absurdity in the century of crowded men’) and Abba Eban (‘It is about time that we stand on our own feet and not on those of the six million dead’).
There is little point mentioning the Shoah if it causes folk to get hard and start stroking themselves off.
Most of these annotations date back to my first visit to Israel and its Occupied Territories, when I was seeking to answer, in my innocence, two perplexing questions: how did Israel come to exercise such a terrible power of life and death over a population of refugees;
same way everybody else does- viz. winning wars. To be fair, Israel now wishes it had just been content with ethnic cleansing- like Pakistan.
and how can the Western political and journalistic mainstream ignore, even justify, its clearly systematic cruelties and injustices?
The same way it can ignore the fact that my ginormous cock presents a threat the the Milky Way's Black Hole's anal cherry.
I had grown up imbibing some of the reverential Zionism of my family of upper-caste Hindu nationalists in India.
Indians were solidly against Zionism. They firmly believed that White Ashkenazis used darker Mizrachis, including Indian 'Beni Israelis' as slaves. Under Ben Gurion, there was some truth to this stereotype. Indian attitudes only changed when Israel started supplying it with valuable military and water conservation technology. Still, I recall my feeling of shock when Abdul Kalam wrote something favorable about that country some 30 years ago.
Both Zionism and Hindu nationalism emerged in the late 19th century out of an experience of humiliation; many of their ideologists longed to overcome what they perceived as a shameful lack of manhood among Jews and Hindus.
This was only true of those in sedentary professions in cities. The Jews had a proportionately larger mercantile class and were a minority everywhere. The vast majority of Hindus were in the majority where they lived. Most soldiers, police officers or landlord's musclemen would be of their own Faith. There were plenty of Hindu Maharajas descended from the ancient Indian warrior aristocracy.
And for Hindu nationalists in the 1970s, impotent detractors of the then ruling pro-Palestinian Congress party, uncompromising Zionists such as Begin, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir seemed to have won the race to muscular nationhood.
Actually, it was the Sikhs who first started identifying with the Israeli Jews. India had to soften its stand against Israel only after Pakistan squeezed it out of Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The other factor was the need to bypass American sanctions regarding certain critical technologies. The Israelis were patient with the Indians but, ultimately, Indo-Israeli relations are transactional.
(The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.)
Israel has sent some smart diplomats to India. But Hamas too has its Social Media warriors. This is a case of troll vs troll.
I remember I had a picture on my wall of Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff and defence minister during the Six-Day War;
apparently his grand-dad had the hots for Moshe. The Sikhs liked Israel because its soldiers also tilled the soil and were said to have irrigated the desert. High Caste Hindus tended to be less enthused by agricultural labor.
and even long after my childish infatuation with crude strength faded, I did not cease to see Israel the way its leaders had from the 1960s begun to present the country, as redemption for the victims of the Shoah, and an unbreakable guarantee against its recurrence.
Israel raised the productivity of its people and became an affluent knowledge economy. Mishra thought 'knowledge' was finding out that some German dude who wrote books said torture was bad and some other Polish dude who wrote even thicker books said Israel wasn't very nice.
Yet, niceness or naughtiness don't matter. Either a people become more productive and thus more capable of protecting themselves and gaining access to scarce resources or they go the way of the Tasmanians- unless, obviously, they can be domesticated or will accept a small wage to do low IQ shit.
I knew how little the plight of Jews scapegoated during Germany’s social and economic breakdown in the 1920s and 1930s had registered in the conscience of Western European and American leaders, that even Shoah survivors were met with a cold shoulder, and, in Eastern Europe, with fresh pogroms.
But ex-Nazis with useful skills were eagerly recruited by the victors. The lesson was plain. Rise in productivity. Gain useful skills. If you can design rockets- or anti-rocket rockets as the Israelis appear to have done- then nobody gives you the cold shoulder. Mishra is very shocked by this. Yet he must have noticed that lower productivity groups in India have lower status. They could be wholly displaced from any fertile or resource rich territory they occupied. Indeed, this had been going on in the sub-continent for at least forty thousand years.
Though convinced of the justice of the Palestinian cause, I found it hard to resist the Zionist logic: that Jews cannot survive in non-Jewish lands and must have a state of their own.
Who gives a fuck what logic this nutter resists?
I even thought it was unjust that Israel alone among all the countries in the world needed to justify its right to exist.
I often think its unjust that I am as stupid as shit. Mishra is more fortunately constituted.
I wasn’t naive enough to think that suffering ennobles or empowers the victims of a great atrocity to act in a morally superior way.
Is he really naive enough to think his shitty little thoughts matter to anyone? If his own people don't give a toss about him, why should anybody else?
That yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimisers is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places.
No. There is only one lesson. You can't victimize anybody if you are as weak as shit. Also, to increase your power to victimize others, or to save yourself from being a victim, you need to do sensible things.
I was still shocked by the dark meaning the Israeli state had drawn from the Shoah,
viz. that if there are people who keep saying they want to exterminate you, then you should either run away or else demonstrate to them that they face the same risk if they start any rough stuff.
and then institutionalised in a machinery of repression.
Killing is cheaper and more final. I suppose that will be the big lesson from the Gaza war.
The targeted killings of Palestinians, checkpoints, home demolitions, land thefts, arbitrary and indefinite detentions, and widespread torture in prisons seemed to proclaim a pitiless national ethos:
my bet is that it will be seen as not pitiless enough. Also, how come we don't have robots to do the killing? Robots are cool.
that humankind is divided into those who are strong and those who are weak, and so those who have been or expect to be victims should pre-emptively crush their perceived enemies.
They can't if they genuinely are weak. The wider problem is that if you start killing and eating the very weak, the less weak may band together and kill and eat you before it gets to be their turn to be killed and eaten. This is a game theoretic argument. Mishra is too stupid to grasp it.
Though I had read Edward Said,
you didn't get that he was a cretin.
I was still shocked to discover for myself how insidiously Israel’s high-placed supporters in the West conceal the nihilistic survival-of-the-strongest ideology reproduced by all Israeli regimes since Begin’s.
Israel's supporters gain by supporting Israel unless they are merely bullshitting. This is because Israel needs to ensure that its supporters are adequately recompensed, one way or another, or else that they will bear a significant cost if they withdraw support. Nobody is secure if those they rely on have no strong incentive to supply required support. Israel and other countries have found that the support or condemnation of virtue signaling cretins is worthless. Michael Polanyi, a great chemist and economist, referred to what Mishra suffers from as 'moral inversion'.
It is in their own interests to be concerned with the crimes of the occupiers,
If they weren't concerned with their own far greater crimes during the War on Terror, why would they worry about Israel? So long as it faces a terror threat, it will be a great incubator for all sorts of anti-insurgency and surveillance technology.
if not with the suffering of the dispossessed and dehumanised; but both have passed without much scrutiny in the respectable press of the Western world.
The not so-respectable Western press- i.e. porn magazines- do scrutinize the shit out of the genitals of all sorts of dehumanized people.
Anyone calling attention to the spectacle of Washington’s blind commitment to Israel is accused of antisemitism and ignoring the lessons of the Shoah.
I accuse the entire galaxy of anti-Semitism because it is ignoring my ginormous dick- probably because it is so ginormous that nobody can ascertain whether or not it is circumcised.
And a distorted consciousness of the Shoah
unlike the one Mishra has
ensures that whenever the victims of Israel, unable to endure their misery any longer, rise up against their oppressors with predictable ferocity, they are denounced as Nazis, hellbent on perpetrating another Shoah.
So there you have it. Mishra's grandfather forced him to wank to posters of Moshe Dayan. Then he read various books by Jews who topped themselves. Now, he alone has an undistorted consciousness of the Shoah. This makes him super special. Sadly he lacks any such magical awareness of my ginormous dick which poses an existential threat to the entire Galaxy.
In reading and annotating
Mishra underlines passage and writes 'so true!' in the margin
the writings of Améry, Levi and others I was trying somehow to mitigate the oppressive sense of wrongness I felt after being exposed to Israel’s bleak construal of the Shoah, and the certificates of high moral merit bestowed on the country by its Western allies.
Why Mishraji is not getting such certificates? Is it coz he iz bleck?
I was looking for reassurance from people
that he wasn't a cretin
who had known, in their own frail bodies, the monstrous terror visited on millions by a supposedly civilised European nation-state, and who had resolved to be on perpetual guard against the deformation of the Shoah’s meaning and the abuse of its memory.
Mishra kept going up to Palestinians who looked like they might have been tortured and saying to them 'please reassure me that it is only my undistorted consciousness of the Shoah which is sweet and nice. Everyone else is totes Nazi in this respect.' Sadly, the Palestinians did not use their own frail bodies to visit some suitably monstrous terror on this asshole.
Despite its increasing reservations about Israel, a political and media class in the West has ceaselessly euphemised the stark facts of military occupation and unchecked annexation by ethnonational demagogues: Israel, the chorus goes, has the right, as the Middle East’s only democracy, to defend itself, especially from genocidal brutes.
How are you going to stop Israel from defending itself? You can't occupy it. It has nukes. If low IQ Islamic nutters could do so much damage on 9/11, just imagine what Jewish terrorists would do.
As a result, the victims of Israeli barbarity in Gaza today cannot even secure straightforward recognition of their ordeal from Western elites,
Which is what really bothers a Mum in Gaza whose kid has just been blown to pieces.
let alone relief. In recent months, billions of people around the world have witnessed an extraordinary onslaught whose victims, as Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, an Irish lawyer who is South Africa’s representative at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, put it, ‘are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain, hope that the world might do something’.
The whole, not just parts, of South Africa will turn into a Zimbabwe type shit-hole soon enough. Who will care whether or not this is 'broadcast in real time'?
But the world, or more specifically the West, doesn’t do anything.
It is helping Israel shoot down Iranian drones and missiles.
Worse, the liquidation of Gaza, though outlined and broadcast by its perpetrators, is daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the instruments of the West’s military and cultural hegemony: from the US president claiming that Palestinians are liars and European politicians intoning that Israel has a right to defend itself to the prestigious news outlets deploying the passive voice while relating the massacres carried out in Gaza.
The problem here is that Hamas planned for Israel to move into Gaza so as to slaughter Palestinians for the greater glory of Iran. This is like Saddam's 'million coffins' march to show that the 'no fly zone' and sanctions were killing little Iraqi babies. It cut no ice because Saddam was the biggest butcher of his own people.
We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time.
Nonsense! We've seen plenty of Baudrillardian 'atrocity masquerading as wars' of this sort since the invasion of Kuwait.
Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief.
Mishra is so shocked and grief-stricken he has composed 7000 words of pseudo-intellectual dreck
Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months.
Mishraji, you have to have a mind in order to lose it. You aren't mad. You are merely stupid, ignorant, boring and repetitive. Still, at least you are shitting on Israel instead of India. The joke is, more and more Indians are going to be taking over jobs there previously done by Palestinians. As for Mishra, will he gracefully make way for a Palestinian writer of equal fatuity? Perhaps. But where could such a creature be found? The Palestinians may have had terrible leaders, but they are sensible enough as a people.
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