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Force Decides

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Israel is currently killing hundreds of people in Gaza.  As they do from time to time.  To make something Abba Eban once said true by simply inverting his meaning: the Israelis never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity for peace.  Though even that is too kind to them.  As even White House senior staff acknowledge, the Israelis don’t want peace.  Give them everything they’ve ever wanted, and it still isn’t enough – because what they say they want isn’t what they want.  What they really want is to continue the war until they have finally completed the work that David Ben-Gurion left unfinished, and eradicated the Palestinians.  The mindset of Israel is genocidal, and becoming more openly so by the day.

It is now clear to a great many people that what happened to the Native Americans as a result of the institution and independence of the United States of America was a scandal, a holocaust and a tragedy.  The idea is so commonplace it’s become a sentimental truism in pop-culture.  Well, Israel had not done very much that America didn’t do in the process of getting where it is today.  Israel has shaken off its origin as a colonial possession of the British Empire.  Israel has ethnically cleansed huge swathes of land of the original inhabitants, and then claimed this land for itself.  Israel has repeatedly started wars for territory.  Israel has herded the original inhabitants of its land mass into tiny, racially-segregated reservations.  And so on.  And yet the obvious – that ‘what happened’ to the Native Americans was terrible – doesn’t seem anything like so obvious to a great many people when you’re talking about the Palestinians.  People seem able to get past the fact that Native Americans did some godawful things to Americans, putting it – rightly – in the context of the Native American’s fight against territorial displacement and dispossession.  Yet Hamas is said to be responsible for the rampage of destruction and slaughter Israel is currently visiting upon the civilians of Gaza, because some people in Gaza have a few relatively meagre weapons which they occasionally have the temerity to use against the nation holding them in a massive concentration camp.  Context be damned.

Clearly, we are more than capable of holding nuanced attitudes to the question of killing people – the problem is that the proper nuances are usually provided for us by people in power.  The nuance allows us to see the sad necessity of killing that is accepted – with a sigh and a tear – by the official goodies, and the utter incommensurable evil of the official baddies.  Sometimes ‘we’ are even allowed to be the baddies – as long as it was a long time ago, and we’re all very sorry now, and nobody defends it (though we all still continue to benefit from it, and do the same things to other people now), and as long as no comparisons are drawn with anything happening today.  We can see that the Native Americans had a context for scalping people, as long as nobody is loopy enough to dare suggesting that perhaps Palestinians have a context for rockets.…

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Déjà bloody vu

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I was going to do this post all over again… (this is what we do with Palestine: say the same bloody things over and over again, because the same bloody things keep happening over and over again)… but Richard Seymour has already done it for me, very succintly.

(EDIT: I originally posted a screencap of Seymour’s tweet of a screencap.  But Seymour has now posted the original screencap itself on his blog.  So it seems only fair to remove my screencap of his tweet and just link to him.  Not that he needs hits from me.) …

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Nearly Silent

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Simon Schama gets a huge slab of BBC money and airtime to obfuscate the truth in the service of Apartheid state Israel, taking official Israeli lies as the basis of his ‘case’.  See here. 

Simon Schama, thinking profound thoughts about history ‘n’ stuff.

Licence-fee money well spent there. 

Best bit, on the wall:

“I want to say, nobody, including me, ultimately has the moral right to say that shouldn’t have happened, the wall shouldn’t have happened. Before the wall happened, hundreds of people were dying every year from terrorist attacks; after the wall happened very, very few….”

Actually, since the start of the wall, over 4,000 Palestinians have died… but they obviously don’t come into the category of ‘people’ for Professor Schama, no more than the Haitian slaves who didn’t get mentioned in his massive book on the French Revolution.

He continues:

“In some senses, if you don’t live in Israel — I don’t live in Israel — you are morally obliged to be nearly silent.”

So shouldn’t that mean that Professor Schama should be “nearly silent” about it?  No, of course not.  He means that people who disapprove of the wall should be “nearly silent”.  That’s the viewpoint that is invalid if it comes from a non-Israeli.  Fascinating how clever people can talk circular, babyish drivel and think it profundity… while being totally unconscious of how they themselves are broadcasting – in this case literally – their own moral hypocrisy.

Or maybe Schama’s programme constituted ‘near silence’… it was, after all, of little substance. 

If only the Palestinians were allowed to be as “nearly silent” on the ‘objective’ BBC as the Zionists.   …

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A Town Without Context

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On ‘A Town Called Mercy’

The ends can justify the means, but there needs to be something which justifies the ends.

 – Trotsky

Jex experiments on people in order to create a cyborg supersoldier.  His motive is to end a war which is killing his people.  But were his people the attackers or the attacked?  That this is ignored tells us a great deal about the writer/s but deprives us of the possibility of making moral sense of the story.  It is ignored, presumably because it is considered irrelevant.  Yet, the whole point of the story appears to be the question of whether Jex is a bad man or a good one… with the answer being, of course, “yes”.  But I’d argue that the wider social context of Jex’s actions (beyond just saying that ‘it was war’) is as important as it is obscure.

The notion – that war is, as Jex puts it, “a different world” in which normality shifts drastically and morality becomes fuzzy – is, for a start, a somewhat glib truism.  Like all such glib truisms, it can be pressed into service (i.e. “Yes, an invasion will kill lots of Iraqi people… but we have to do something; Saddam has WMD!!!”) or ignored (i.e. “Those Muslamic terrorists are killing Our Boys!!!  Why do they hate us???”) according to ideological needs and preferences.

Kryten would find it easier to get rid of the Apocalypse Boys
now that he’d been assimilated by the Borg.

‘A Town Called Mercy’ actually tries to hone in on questions of moral ambiguity, and to try to represent that ambiguity in a sustained way, which is actually fairly good going for the series (at this time).  Usual practice for Moffat-era Who is to suggest extremely crude, superficially worrying moral equivalences in dialogue which are then papered-over by the actual behaviour of the Doctor and his gang (whom we might want to start calling ‘Our Boys and Girls’, since it is assumed that they deserve ‘our’ support whatever they do).  ‘Mercy’, by contrast, briefly shows the lead characters in genuine quandries about what to do for the best.  Sadly, however, vital information is omitted from their calculations… and the omissions are interesting.

As I say, it’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation that a basically good guy can do horrible things.  Orwell begins The Lion & The Unicorn – written during the Blitz – with a passage saying that, as he writes, civilised people are flying overhead trying to kill him.  The pilot in the bomber, Orwell remarks, “is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”

Jex is, of course, serving his ‘country’, so to speak.  But is he from Space Poland or from the empire of the Space Nazis?  To translate into geek: is he as much of a Bajoran as he seems, or is he a Cardassian?  Or is the situation more complex than that?  Is it more like America vs Japan?  Two rival empires clashing.  One the overt aggressor, but the other also implicated in bringing the conflict on via, say, provocation.…

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If Only We Had a Reasonable Negotiating Partner…

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Anniversary of the Nakba today, an event that shaped the modern world, creating a festering sore of injustice that still infects global politics.

Also, less importantly, the origin of a situation that provides the basis for a vast number of trite, naive, glib, uninformed political allegories in sci-fi TV shows.

The Silurians got the treatment in their first reappearance in the new series, ‘The Hungry Earth’ / ‘Cold Blood’ (2010).

The funny thing is that, wheras the intentional Palestine allegory worked up in these episodes doesn’t fit the real facts, patronises the oppressed, excuses the oppressors, etc, the accidental allegory works.  Indeed, it chimes surprisingly well witth the Silurians generally.  Every time the Silurians come back they are still squeezed out, displaced, outnumbered… and every time they are condemned when they dare to get angry about it, and exhorted by the liberal hero to stay indefinitely patient, warned that if they don’t then they’ll have lost the moral high ground, effectively informed that its up to them to be forebearing to the people who’ve stolen their world. And they never get anywhere near getting redress or restitution.

Most recently, the solution offered to the matter was for the Silurians to retire again and wait for humanity to become more liberal and tolerant all by itself.  As Charles Daniels argued on the comment threads, this is repulsive.  It says that the oppressed must wait for their oppressors to see the light.  The agency lies with the oppressors.  The oppressed must simply be patient.  Such things happen because humans are just intolerant.  But luckily there’s (in Dawkins’ vacuous phrase) an “ever changing moral zeitgeist” which will inevitably lead us to greater heights of liberalism, without us having to do anything.  (A millenarian idea if ever I heard one.)

Meanwhile, back in storyland, the best solution is for the Silurians and the humans to live apart.  Well, there’s a word for that.  A word increasingly being recognised as an apt description of the Israeli domination of Palestine: Apartheid.

The only bit that doesn’t tesselate beautifully is the origin of the situation. The Silurians retired voluntarily because they thought the Moon was going to crash into the Earth.  A natural disaster / tragic misunderstanding with no cause and no agency behind it is the official, mainstream narrative, not the reality.…

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Children in Need

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The BBC’s failure to protect kids from Jimmy Savile is revolting, but it’s hardly the beginning or the end of their disinterest in violence against children.  Certain children, anyway.  The keepers of Pudsey are strangely uninterested in the child victims of powerful and influential people… be they depraved DJs or depraved states that happen to be Western allies.

For instance, as I write this, the state of Israel – a brutal, aggressive, nuclear armed, apartheid state which is mysteriously supposed to be less of a threat to world peace than Iran – is murdering Gazan children.  (It does no good, by the way, to trot out that old chestnut about them not deliberately aiming at the kids… if you get a machine gun and spray bullets blindly into a school, it’s no good later claiming you were only trying to hit the cigar-smoking TV personality lurking in the corner.)

This is nothing new, nor is the BBC response, which is as routine as it is pusilanimous.  Indeed, cowardice in the face of the powerful Israeli lobby (not to mention the backing Israel gets from the USA and our government) is the most charitable interpretation.  A less charitable – and probably more accurate – interpretation would be that those BBC content providers covering the ‘conflict’ in Gaza are unaware of the way they are loading and slanting their words.

Some examples?  Try these from the BBC website today.  Click on them to make them bigger.

Note that the ‘Key Points’ are all to do with the so-called ‘targeted assassination’ of a Hamas leader.  Note the phrase “militant groups”, presumably including Hamas, a democratically elected party.  Note the prominence given to Israeli officials, who are allowed to frame the Israeli operation as being aimed at “terror targets” in response to “days of on going rocket attacks on Israeli civilians”, the aim being to “protect Israeli civilians” (the only civilians who matter, or even exist, apparently).

No mention of the Gazan civilians, including young children, slaughtered.  Can you imagine how differently the page might read if the Palestinian rockets had caused any comparable damage to Israel, or if Iran had bombed somebody and caused as much suffering?

This one from today too:

Here’s the headline.  Note the relative sizes (and thus importance) given to Israeli and Palestinian deaths… bearing in mind the ratios and the fact that Israel is immensely better armed.  Notice the decontextualised way the attack becomes “cross-border violence” in line with the BBC’s usual way of depicting Israel/Palestine as a two-tribes-squabble issue, rather than the brutal domination of a subjugated captive minority by a powerful state.

Yesterday, the blog Electronic Intifada published a “statement from international academics who recently particpated in a conference on linguistics at the Islamic University of Gaza which decries major media outlets’ failure to report on recent killings of Palestinian civilians by Israeli forces in Gaza.”  The statement spells out the issue far better than I could, and takes in the BBC’s role as peddling the unbalanced and dishonest message. …

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