Monday, October 9, 2023

This Was Not Resistance

 

Hundreds of young concert-goers were killed, survivors were raped. They were young people: not the oppressors. Resistance discriminates. It uses necessary force. This was blood lust. This is why I don't feel a part of the far left: they suck. The DSA constantly uses division and smug up-fuckery to fail to accomplish even the merest goals. I noticed fucking PLO posters carried during the anti-Iraq war march 20 years ago. Fuck, people. Concentrate on one clear atrocity and stop being fellow travelers with bullshit. 

For example, Codepink dressed in weird costumes and played Pick-me Progressives and did nothing to end the Iraq or Afghanistan Wars because no one took them seriously. They protested against striking on ISIS. Also against striking Assad for the chem attacks, which I in retrospect wish Obama did. Because fuck that guy.

And here's Code Pink seen just recently snuggling up to Marjorie Taylor Green's gym-sweaty armpit:




Being exactly who one might expect:


Palestinians have every right to resist with force up to and including the murder of civilians and rape currently being committed by HAMAS, but Ukraine does not have the right to resist the murdering and rapist Russians who are hell-bent on occupying them? Ok. That's certainly...a take. 

But good on Codepink for demonstrating that they are not pacifists, which is what some might assume. Nor are they useful idiots, because while they are idiots, I fail to see how they have ever been useful. They only further demonstrate that there is a reason they get ignored by mainstream Democrats. Also, good on forming a red/brown alliance with conspiracy-theorists and Nazis. It takes a lot of the starch out of their overbearing smugness so they can just be laughed at. 

I remember in the before 2016 times when I watched asshats like Lee Camp on RT and them and almost felt the pull of leftier-than-thousim. It's just literally "Blame America first." A kernel of legitimate US policy criticism drawn out to absurd lengths. 

But I note that they are against Russia, Syria and Iran's Hezbollah/Hamas connection being attacked. Which makes me feel a certain way about what is going on with them, and with those connections. 

That Gazans live under apartheid, I will not lie about. But this attack is not a form of protest, but terror. And legitimizing terrorism is not or at least, should not be, pacifist goals. Liberation can occur through direct action, but it will not work if unsympathetic, let alone contemptible. 

I find the performative contrarianism in the name of siding with "anti-imperialism" or "anti-colonialism" also wild when cited by the left regarding a place where Palestinian Jews coexisted previously with Palestinian Arabs. 

I'm just not having these false narratives anymore than if they came from Republicans. They are equally as shocking at the pallets of cash lies. 


7 comments:

Ali Redford said...

Thank you. You have a gift for clarifying lines others tend to blur.

Grung_e_Gene said...

Gaza is an open air prison in which the Israelis are engaged in a slow ethnic cleansing. Hamas will not suffer but, many innocents will. Hamas Terrorist Attacks are evil and wrong and not justified by indiscriminate Israeli violence. Israeli war crimes in Gaza "We are putting a complete siege on Gaza … No electricity, no food, no water, no gas – it’s all closed,” Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said in a video statement. are not justified by the murder and kidnappings of innocent people at a rave party.

Neville Chamberlain was right in 1938, whomever we call the Victor in this on't be a winner, in war there are only losers.

Green Eagle said...

Gaza is an independent country. Its problems are the result of the behavior of its genocidal government, not the nonexistent Israeli "apartheid." If you couldn't see how insane the demand that Israel open its borders to Gaza was by last week I would think you would have figured out this weekend what that would produce- not a day of murderous terror, but an endless flood of killers coming across the border every day, replenished from the sea by other Muslim countries. You might as well have asked France and Czechoslovakia and Belgium and Poland to provide open access to their countries in 1939 from Germany. And your attitude about "apartheid" is rendered all the more intolerable by your failure to recognize that every single Arab country, including Gaza, practices open apartheid, and many of them engage in ethnic cleansing too, with people who feign outrage about Israel showing absolutely zero concern for that. Sorry, I really like what you generally have to say, but you are wrong about this.

Vixen Strangely said...

Grean Eagle, I don't like the term "apartheid" being used in conjunction with the Palestinian situation because comparisons are odious, but I'm just following in the footsteps of Jimmy Carter, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, the UN special rapporteur and the telling of the ANC some of whom lived under apartheid. The hafrada situation under which the Palestinians live is somewhat more like segregation here in the states over sixty years ago, and the reason for it is much less about projection of the harm that a given group could do, but a terrible answer to what has been a known threat.

To not bore everybody, the Palestinian National Authority isn't Palestinian, national, or an authority. What the hell do they actually have control of? Most of the land is subject to Israeli rules. Palestinians get evicted from their homes for reasons and can't go anywhere else and neither can they build. They watch settlers take their homes. Their olive groves have been torched. (I'm Italian by marriage and visit the old country and fucking up ancient olive trees somehow sits evil with me.) Workers travelling from one fragmented Palestinian site to another looks like a prisoner transfer. Palestine Arabs are demographically young and have never seen normal and have been trained on fuckery and spite.

https://www.newarab.com/news/israeli-settlers-burn-100-olive-trees-occupied-west-bank

Now I'm going to go with you on this: what is Israel to do? Because every time Palestinians get some kind of accord, Hamas or the like fucks it up. They shouldn't live under the gun. No one should. So here we are, a civilized Israel. A permanently fucked up non-country called loosely Palestine. And the danger represented by each and every generation of Palestinians seeing the crackdown of Hamas affecting people who have nothing to do with Hamas. Prey to bullshit from other players in the ME who fund the ongoing troubles for their own political benefit.

I've tried to wrap my head around the paradox for years. I feel bad about innocent, not-Hamas Palestinians and think their lives have been irreconcilably fucked over by terror on their side, security overreach furthering the problem on the Israeli side. And no, I haven't got an answer to that. I can only admit that if one side can deny food and medicine and electricity and water to the other--they are by no means equals. And everything Hamas is doing only means more pain for Palestinians, and Israel has nonetheless got to do what they got to do.

I will admit Hamas and terror are appalling. I will not abandon the idea that Palestinian people deserve better, even if I can see blame on both sides for that is up with their continued oppression.

Grung_e_Gene said...

It's ridiculous to call Gaza an independent country. And just as ridiculous to ignore the violence Israel has directed at Gaza since 2006. Equally unserious is to ignore the fact that Netanyahu literally supports Hamas and has done so in order to scuttle any political solution

“Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas,” Netanyahu told his Likud party’s Knesset members in March 2019. “This is part of our strategy"

Hamas and Likud are Extremists who love and need each other. Netanyahu ignored Gaza because he was busy helping settlers confiscate the West Bank and he was removing their Supreme Court barriers to his fascist rule. The two state solution died when Netanyahu had Yitzak Rabin assassinated.

https://twitter.com/haaretzcom/status/1711329340804186619?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1711329340804186619%7Ctwgr%5E1e72480cff6c380377b1177e0b9b4b09b6e9637f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fballoon-juice.com%2F

Green Eagle said...

Here's a unique irony: In the United States, we have a situation where the entire political momentum is devastated by propaganda paid for by a tiny number of sociopathic billionaires who want to run the world for their sole benefit. They have damaged the world views of tens of millions of Americans- paying for just enough followers to keep themselves in control of a population which largely repudiates them. In the Middle East, we have the same thing. There, the sociopathic billionaires are the oil dictators, who have managed to spread their lying propaganda around the world. What makes this particularly painful to left wingers like myself is that this propaganda has been (at least in the West) largely directed toward the left, resulting in large numbers of leftists who have bought into the Arab lies about what life in Israel is like, without having a clue about what really goes on there. Thus, declaring that Gaza, which has been independent for 18 years, is "not an independent country," so that its government can be absolved of responsibility for its endless atrocities, both toward Israel and its own people, or savaging Israel for things like building a wall, while ignoring the real apartheid and ethnic cleansing that are the norm in every Arab country.

I have been opposed to Netanyahu since the late 1990's, I suspect long before Gene ever heard of him, but as much damage as he has done, to compare him to Mohammad bin Salman, or the corrupt, murderous Hamas and PA governments is an atrocity. Israel remains a largely democratic country with guaranteed equal rights for everyone. It would be laughable to suggest that this exists in any Arab country, and to do so is an affront to human decency.

Grung_e_Gene said...

Yeah... baloney, you're not opposed to Netanyahu. Benjamin Netanyahu is a Fascist as is his Likud Party. His absurd lies helped to push the US into War with Iraq;
"If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."

I'm sorry your Israel blindness allows you to defend War Crimes because you consider Arabs as less than human. And oppressed people lash out.

Please don't feel the need to lie about the situation in Gaza or the FACT Israel is an Apartheid Regime and is as Democratic as the Trumpublican Party.

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