Incredibly the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now reaching
new heights of violence. Casualty figures are not coming
in, as the attacks are so bad that bodies cannot be
recovered, medics cannot travel and there are almost no
medical facilities operational now anyway.
We now see that the Western injunctions not to attack
Rafah were a smokescreen of lies to mask complicity. The
final pocket of Gaza is being ruthlessly ethnically
cleansed and its infrastructure will be destroyed like
all the rest.
It is striking that this is accompanied by an absolutely
shameless doubling down of support for Israel by the
Western political and media classes. Any thought that
their isolation from the vast breadth of public opinion
would give them pause, must be abandoned. Their Zionist
lobby paymasters have jerked the chain, and rather than
rowing back, we are seeing a redoubling of their efforts
to suppress dissent and obscure the truth.
Some of this shameless distortion is so dissonant with
the alleged norms of Western society it is almost
impossible to believe it is happening. Here are a few
examples.
1) Dr Ghassan Abu Sitta is a highly respected
reconstructive surgeon who continued to work heroically
and tirelessly in Al Shifa hospital, carrying out
operation after operation, mostly on women and children,
as the hospital was shelled, strafed and machine gunned
around him.
He was already a surgeon of great distinction, based in
Glasgow where he is now Rector of Glasgow University.
When Germany banned him from entering to address the
conference on Palestine from which Yanis Varoufakis and
others were also barred, it appeared perhaps as a one-
off action as part of Germany’s extreme and panicked
reaction to pro-Palestinian expression.
We have come to understand that Germany has a vicious
hatred of Palestinians, remarkably based on the
psychological trauma of inherited guilt from the
Holocaust. While this is a muddled national psychosis
that is plainly immoral and wrongheaded, at least it is
possible to have some understanding of how it occurred.
But it then turned out that the travel ban slapped on Dr
Abu Sitta by Germany has a Schengen-wide effect as he
was also banned from France. That appeared again
something that was almost a technical accident as
regards the rest of Europe.
But the Western political establishment has now doubled
down again by banning him from the Netherlands, and this
time the Dutch government has made it clear that it
supports the ban, and is not just caught by a Schengen
restriction.
So the major governments of the European Union are
forbidding a distinguished surgeon from giving first-
hand medical evidence of the genocide taking place. I
cannot think of anything that more sharply exposes the
willingness of the Western political class to abandon
the most basic tenets of supposed “Western democracy” in
the interests of Israel.
2) The willingness of the United States to use extreme
violence against pro-Palestinian students on college
campuses is another demonstration of the same
abandonment of the pretence of democracy when it comes
to Israel. It also illustrates what has come to be a
serious generational divide in Western public opinion,
with young people very strongly motivated to oppose the
genocide (which is not to say that older people are pro-
genocide, just that they are more split, particularly in
the USA).
This is being followed up with yet more crazed pro-
Israeli legislation in the United States, seeking to
designate anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian expression
on campuses as anti-semitic and thus illegal.
In many ways this typifies the reaction of the ruling
class across the West. Their reaction to suddenly being
exposed as the paid servants of an Israel which no
longer has popular support and now causes public
revulsion, is simply to attempt to ban free expression
and make it specifically illegal to disagree with them.
3) The British Labour Party has gone even madder. Keir
Starmer’s Genocide Party is an outstanding example of
the success of the Israeli lobby in buying up both sides
of the aisle and controlling the entire neoliberal
uniparty that poses as the repository of democratic
“choice” in the West.
Starmer had been doing his best to conceal his
explicitly expressed “unequivocal support for Israel”
lately, and to row back from his straightforward
assertion that Israel has the right to cut off food and
water from the population of Gaza. There had been a fake
shift, from refusing to countenance the word “ceasefire”
to supporting a temporary ceasefire or a “sustainable”
ceasefire – the latter being code for a ceasefire after
Israel had achieved all its ethnic cleansing objectives.
But then David Lammy blew this out of the water with an
address to US Republican senators in which he made the
totally bonkers assertion that Nelson Mandela would have
opposed the college protests for Palestine. Lammy is a
truly despicable individual, one of the ultimate
examples of the corrupt politician whose voice is
bought. But this was a move far beyond the pale.
4) Even today, the Western media continues to spout out
Israeli propaganda at mains pressure. The Guardian,
despite the thousands and thousands of dead women and
children we have seen on our mobile phones this past
seven months, continues to pretend that the genocidal
attack is on “Hamas militants”.
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