By Isaac N. Ishmael
Middle East Correspondent
As violence flares in the strife-torn Middle East, informed observers rate the chances for a quick peaceful settlement as slim to none, citing the huge weapons stockpiles both sides have accumulated and deploy against the other day and night.
The stockpiled weapon of choice? It's that staple of Middle East warfare: bullshit.
In the latest exchange of bullshit, Israel announced today that its destruction of a building in Gaza it knew housed credible news outlets like the Associated Price was not part of a program either to neutralize credible, i.e. hostile, coverage from Gaza or to exact a bloody toll to improve crooked Bibi's chances of holding on to power. Instead, it was because somewhere else in the building, in addition to innocent families, there were supposed “Hamas intelligence sources:”
You have to hand to the Israelis (or not; they'll take it away from you anyhow): no one can deliver a precision guided load of bullshit better. What tf is a Hamas intelligence source? That description probably covers most of the 2,000,000 helpless exposed Gazans other than Hamas's sworn enemies. One of the leading suppliers of Middle East bullshit, the @IDF Twitter account, admitted that pretty much any high-rise building in Gaza was to them fair game:
Maybe the Israelis could provide a list of buildings in Gaza they believe to be free of any Hamas agent or sympathizer they regard as a legitimate military target, regardless of how many babies sleep in the apartments above and below.
Because the building housed American journalists, the Israeli forces provided advance notice of the attack, a courtesy not apparently provided to the over 80 Gazan civilians, many of them children, buried alive by Israeli attacks.
But before we get too far along, we repeat that both sides are amply supplied with bullshit and neither side is reluctant to shoot off thousands of rounds of it. On social media, a mouthpiece for Netanyahu sent out supposed pictures of a Hamas rocket attack that was actually taken in 2018 in Syria, while pro-Palestinian groups circulate false pictures of Israelis supposedly faking casualties.
The Hamas terror organization, which should be recalled holds a death grip on Gaza and considers itself at war with Israel, and its millions of sympathizers deploy bullshit as promiscuously as Hamas sends missiles into Israel. These missiles, being essentially unguided, have no conceivable legitimate military purpose. They are fired solely to terrorize and kill Israeli civilians, again including children.
But let's see how Hamas and their cheerleaders bury this simple truth under kilotons of bullshit:
To many Palestinians, the rockets symbolize their rightful resistance to Israeli dominance and occupation.
Although justifying terror attacks on civilians going about their daily lives (which is the accurate description of Hamas missile launches) on the grounds that you're rightfully resisting denial of political rights is heavy bullshit ordnance, it does allow us to widen out our focus and see how bullshit is used by all parties on all fronts of the current conflict.
The trigger for the latest exchange of deadly high explosive missiles and bullshit was a dispute over displacing Palestinian families from a district of Jerusalem. The precision pinpoint bullshit delivered by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs told us it was just an obscure property dispute that dated back for a century so nothing to see here people, move along.
In fact, it is just the latest front in the 30 year effort to replace Palestinians with Israelis across a large swath of Occupied Territory that Israel likes to call “Jerusalem,” although the borders of the district extend kilometers beyond the Old City:
That little tiny dark blue shape is the Old City of Jerusalem. Anything not in light green shows what Israel decided it would take after 1967.
It's all part of a larger Israeli effort to pave the Occupied Territory of the West Bank with Israeli settlements to deny Palestinians any meaningful possibility of a state of their own there. The Israelis are offering Palestinians in “Jerusalem,” and rest of the West Bank a choice between permanent second-class status under Israeli rule or leaving altogether.
Powering this choice is the 100-megaton Israeli bullshit bomb that there are no such people as “Palestinians.” They are supposedly only Arabs, who would would feel equally at home anywhere from Casablanca to Kuwait.
Fortunately, under the doctrine of mutually assured truth destruction, the Palestinians have an equally monstrous bullshit pile: their claim that Israelis have no right to a state of their own, despite having had one since 1948 (and according to a popular book, before that too).
The immediate results of the bullshit crossfire is violence
unleashed by Israelis on their Palestinian fellow citizens. And vice versa.
Yet the equally impressive arsenals of bullshit, although brilliantly successful in turning neighbor against neighbor from Lod to Haifa to Jerusalem, can't seem to wipe out the essential fact: that neither the Israelis and nor the Palestinians are leaving, and both claim the place. In a Middle East in which bullshit had been beaten into fertilizer, each would have a state.
So why not start talks under the auspices of the United States aiming toward a general reduction of bullshit in the Middle East, which could give rise over some period of time to something that looks like peace, freedom, human dignity, and security?
The answer is the Bullshit-Industrial Complex, a joint Israeli-Palestinian institution by which incompetent corrupt wannabe dictators produce and then set off great masses of bullshit, not to protect or serve their populations, but to preserve their hold on power.
The normally staid New York Times put it just a tad more elegantly:
In a massive bullshit barrage, the corrupt indicted Israeli Prime Minister for Life declared today that the continued civilian carnage in Gaza would continue, not until his re-election is secured (which would be the truth) but
or, in other words, never, as the only way to ensure that no more rockets are fired from Gaza would be to eliminate all 2 million of its inhabitants.
As long as producing and using weapons of mass bullshit remains a reliable path to power for both Hamas and the Likud, look for continued violence and misery.
Now we all know that the greatest defense against bullshit is truth, or at least we like to think so in spite of the Trumpublican Party. Maybe that's why the forces of bullshit in the region targeted The Associated Press. It's not just democracy that dies in darkness.
The children of Gaza and Israel do too.
No comments:
Post a Comment