Mukul Kesavan writes in the Telegraph of
A moral void
During the last US election, it was possible to see Biden as the good guy because
he and Obama had killed plenty of Muslims and helped displace tens of millions more in Syria, Libya etc.
Trump had been so performatively wicked.
He hadn't killed a lot of Muslims. Also, he made peace with the Taliban and was preparing to pull out US troops.
It is impossible to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt again
Why not? Biden did end up running the fuck away from Afghanistan. He is cowardly. That's a good thing because, as Obama said, American foreign policy consists of doing stupid shit.
For an outsider, it’s hard to see how a Donald Trump win would make a difference to American foreign policy.
No it isn't. Iran will become more cautious. Trump will try to prise Putin apart from Xi. He will force the Europeans to speed up the creation of a European Army capable of sealing its borders. Zelensky will have an excuse to concede 'peace with honour.'
Kamala Harris has been careful not to depart from Joe Biden’s policy of giving Israel the weapons it needs to destroy Palestinian society in Gaza and the West Bank.
If she wins because of Gen Zee, she may abandon Israel. After all, she wants to be a two term POTUS.
America has continued to arm Israel through its Gaza-style flattening of Lebanon.
Which is why it still has a role in the MENA. As Nixon realized, if Israel goes its own way, America will be seen as a paper tiger. The Saudis have already shown their contempt for Biden. Qatar will suddenly find that hosting American troops can make it a target.
Harris’s campaigning proxy, Bill Clinton, recently made a speech in Michigan where, addressing that state’s Muslim voters, he declared that the slaughter in Gaza was down to Palestinian intransigence. Just in case they didn’t understand, he explained that the number of Palestinians killed made no difference to the rightness of Israel’s war: “I am not keeping score that way,” he said, speaking on behalf of Israelis who might have lost family during Hamas’s October 7 attack. He’s right; the vibe might be different but neither Trump nor Harris is interested in counting the Palestinian dead.
Nor, more importantly, are Hamas and their Iranian backers. It is hilarious that Hanafi Arabs are dying for the greater glory of Iran.
A European acquaintance I met earlier this year was unmoved by the slaughter in Gaza on two counts: one,
we killed way more Muslims during our war on terror
Hamas had started it
just as Al Qaeda started the war on terror
and two, Gaza wasn’t the most important issue in the world.
It isn't important even for the Ikhwan. Let the people there die or starve or try to cross into Egypt.
For Europe (and implicitly the West), Ukraine was the existential battlefield du jour.
Only after Putin's troops turned out to be crap while Zelensky turned out to be Winston fucking Churchill.
Since the ‘axis’ powers that opposed the West in Ukraine included Iran, the patron of Hamas and Hezbollah, Gaza’s claim on European and American empathy was small. In this latest civilisational conflict, the Palestinians were on the wrong side.
When were they on the right side? In Jordan when they tried to kill the King and take over the country? General Zia helped the Hashemites slaughter Palestinians during 'Black September'. Arafat had pissed off Assad so he declined to help. The Palestinians then moved on to Lebanon which they very quickly wrecked. A Palestinian refugee in Lebanon is barred from 39 high paying professions- e.g. Medicine. They are welcome to clean the streets.
This person is a liberal, viscerally hostile to both Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, but in the world as it is, it isn’t unusual for Western liberals to both disapprove of ‘populists’ and be unmoved by ethnic cleansing.
Kesavan is Tamil on his father's side. Name me one White 'Liberal' who was 'moved' by the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils. Even my appeal to Rishi Sunak to assist the return of Iyers to their ancestral homeland- Ireland- fell on deaf years even though I spoke to him in tet Punjabi. That sly bastard pretended he was an Urdu speaking Muslim running a takeaway establishment. Same thing happened when I rang Sir Keir Starmer.
The two positions are, in fact, connected; the liberal centrists who run Western countries — Keir Starmer, Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz — would prefer a non-Likud leader helming the slaughter with the right mix of handwringing and havoc than Bibi and his ghoulishly genocidal cabinet colleagues.
If we lost the war on terror, why can't the Israelis lose one or two similar wars? Would that be too much to ask?
Through most of the first year of the war on Gaza, The Economist, the house organ of Western liberalism, tried to make the case that Israel’s murderous war was sanctioned by international law.
If the war on terror was so sanctioned, so is Israel's.
It was a just war that couldn’t be delegitimised by the number of Palestinians killed. It has stopped making this case explicitly ever since the guardians of international law, the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice,
The UK seems to be disengaging with both. Still, it would be nice to see Starmer hand Blair over to the Hague for trial as a war criminal.
began taking allegations of war crimes and genocide against Israel seriously,
with the result that no one now takes it seriously.
but, as with my European acquaintance, it continues to see dead Palestinians as collateral damage in a necessarily drawn-out war.
Just as it saw dead Muslims in that light. Don't forget we were bringing Democracy and Human Rights to Afghanistan and Iraq and so forth. We didn't mean to make a gift of those places to the Taliban or the Iranian Ayatollahs.
The threat that Trump will give Netanyahu a free hand to finish off the Palestinians is premised on the claim that Biden has reined Bibi in.
He reined in himself. He should have blown the Houthis to kingdom come the moment they attacked a US flagged ship in the Red Sea.
This is a grotesque piece of special pleading:
Nobody is pleading with Kesavan- though, no doubt, people hold their nose and move away from him anytime he farts. His mother was Punjabi. Thus his already very powerful TamBram farts must be truly lethal.
the United Nations secretary-general and the chiefs of UN agencies have warned that the entire population of northern Gaza faces imminent death from starvation, disease and bombardment.
If the UN says so, the reverse must be the case.
Apart from some performative tutting, the US government has done nothing to curb Israel’s now-explicit strategy of starving and bombing Palestinians out of north Gaza.
Worse yet, they have done nothing to curb Kesavan's farts. Did you know they are so powerful that they can reach London? That's what you are smelling. It wasn't me who tooted.
The mass killing in Palestine and Lebanon is happening with the blessing of Biden’s government.
Biden is also repeatedly blessing Kesavan's arsehole and encouraging it to fart in a very smelly manner.
Israel’s usefulness as a strategic US outpost in the Middle East is obvious from the excitement generated amongst Western pundits by Israel’s strikes on Iran and its proxies. The reason there is no ceasefire in Lebanon and Gaza is that America hasn’t been able to broker the total surrender that both Netanyahu and Biden see as the appropriate outcome of this year-long investment in slaughter.
Nor has it brokered Kesavan's farts. Biden is truly useless.
The difference between Trump and Biden on the issue of Palestine is hard to see.
Nope. He will say 'fuck all dem rag-heads to death!'
The Abraham Accords were negotiated by Trump and taken forward by Biden and Antony Blinken.
But they didn't include Hamas. Only the Chinese recognized that entity. We hoped they would broker a peace deal. But this wasn't possible because Hamas doesn't give a fuck about Gaza. It is concerned with the wider political fortunes (not to mention financial fortunes) of the Ikhwan and its billionaire leaders.
Finessing the Palestinians and helping Israel produce the conditions that make a Palestinian State impossible have been unspoken tenets of American foreign policy for a quarter of a century and more.
No. American policy since the time of the Rodgers Plan has been to push Israel back to its pre '67 borders. Clinton seemed to be succeeding in this. But Arafat was as crazy as a shithouse rat.
A Democratic administration will dress up ethnic cleansing in Gaza as humanitarian relocation while Trump will be more explicit about Palestinian losers taking their medicine, but left to the American State, no other outcome is likely.
The American State is on its way out in the region. It is directly responsible for the rise and rise of Iran.
Ironically, the existential conflict in Ukraine that my acquaintance was concerned about isn’t likely to be materially affected by Trump’s election.
Yes it is. If Trump wins in November, there will be peace by Christmas. Hopefully, Putin has learned his lesson and won't be greedy.
The scare-mongering about Trump withdrawing support from Volodymyr Zelensky ignores the fact that even the most hawkish Western commentators now accept that Ukraine will have to negotiate an end to the fighting that will involve surrendering some part of its territory to Russia because the US and Europe can’t bankroll the war indefinitely.
The greater threat is that Putin is replaced by somebody who isn't shit.
Trump represents Americans who don’t want to pay to police the world. The sooner Europe comes to terms with a parochial America, and the quicker this erstwhile hyperpower comes to terms with its relatively diminished standing, the better it’ll be for the rest of the world.
This happened in 2016. Hilary was more hawkish than Obama.
During the last US presidential election, it was possible to see Biden as the good guy because Trump had been so performatively wicked. The trashing of the nuclear deal with Iran,
coz what the world really needs is Houthis with nukes- right?
the anti-Muslim rhetoric,
he was happy enough to cuddle with Imran Khan- whom Biden refused to even talk to by phone. The result was that Imran went to see Putin rather than attend the 'Democracy Summit'. Currently, two Muslim leaders- Imran and Hasina- say they were toppled by Biden's dark arts.
the bad faith of the so-called Abraham Accords,
a sound enough commercial proposition
the anti-immigrant xenophobia
if Trump wins this time, it will be only for this reason
and the misogyny made foreigners like me root for the Democrats.
Kesavan also tooted for the Democrats. The stench was indescribable.
We live in a small world and the character of the American State matters. It is impossible, though, to give the Democrats the benefit of the doubt again.
Nobody gains any sort of benefit from Kesavan. Even if he acknowledges my superior flatulence on Twitter- as I have repeatedly urged him to do- nobody would notice.
Not only did the Biden administration follow Trump’s lead in every substantive foreign policy matter (including China),
Nonsense! Trump would cuddle with anybody who looked popular or whose country had pots of cash. Biden would scold them till, like the Crown Prince, they told him to go fuck himself.
but it also literally embraced Netanyahu’s violence in Gaza.
No! As I have previously observed, Biden did not embrace Netanyahu. He just let him come on his tits.
He went along with the demonisation of the anti-war protests on US college campuses.
A gift to Trump.
Kamala Harris made no attempt to distance herself from Biden’s complicity in slaughter.
Because she wants to get elected POTUS not Chairperson of the Disabled Lesbians of Colour Support Committee for Hamas rapists.
She couldn’t even summon up the courage to allow a Palestinian to address the Democratic National Convention.
Nor did she even stab her Jewish husband a couple of times in the chest. Why was she so cowardly? Is it coz she is bleck?
Her calculation was that pro-Palestinian voters in Michigan and the rest of America either didn’t matter or had nowhere else to go.
Why don't they want to go settle in Gaza? Is it coz Gaza is a shithole?
We’ll know on election day if she got her math right, but we know already that on the great matter of our time, she got her morals wrong.
She should stab hubby repeatedly. Also why did she not personally perform gender reassignment surgery on Joe Biden? Is it because she is bleck?
As Biden’s deputy, she was complicit in the genocide.
as Biden was complicit in the killing of lots and lots of Muslims
She crossed that line, not Trump.
Because she was Biden's Veep, not Trump. Still, at least she could have stabbed hubby.
We don’t have to imagine the horrors that might come to pass under Trump;
Kesavan will be sodomized by Trump even if he refrains from farting- and thus drawing attention to his arsehole.
we saw in hideous video clips the unending horror of Gaza on her watch.
It must be said, Hamas's rape and torture videos were better in that department. They understand their market.
Her best argument is that a MAGA presidency will deprive American women of their legal right to abortion.
Which is a matter for the State legislature.
She’s right. But a liberal who reckons that the right of American women to choose can’t co-exist with an acknowledgement of the right of Palestinians to live
Kesavan is pro-choice. If his father rapes him and gets him pregnant, he will have the baby because of the 'right to life'.
is a moral void, not a liberal.
Kesavan is a moral void or would be if he didn't quickly fill it up with his farts. Is he a liberal? No. He is too stupid.
There is something clarifying about that. Whichever way this election goes, America will be a shabbier place once the votes are counted.
It wasn't shabby when it had Jim Crow and Indians found it nigh on impossible to get Green Cards. The fact is, if you keep out foreigners, the indigenous people have a higher incentive to make and keep things nice.
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