I’ve been sick for the past two days. Literally sick, as in ill, but also sick to fucking death of the acts of arrogance and unconscionable evil that take place every single day as the death spiral tightens on what passes for our civilization. And as if the acts aren’t bad enough, the few among us who still remember what life was like in 1983, pre-newspeak, are being prodded by the Goebbelsian swagger stick known as the corporate media into believing that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, and last but certainly not least, that the sorry fucking excuses for human beings who run poor little Israel have a free pass to do whatever the fuck they please.
I apologize for the hackneyed nature of my Orwellian Nazi mixed metaphor, but really, what else is there to say when a ship full of unarmed civilians, in international waters, attempting to deliver humanitarian aid to the modern-day equivalent of the Warsaw ghetto, is stormed in the dead of night by commandos with automatic weapons? Oh, and I almost forgot to add the irony of all ironies, which is that the stormtroopers work for the very people who made the humanitarian aid necessary in the first place with their theft of Palestinian land in 1948, and their apartheid policies since then leading to a population of starving people, walled-in and deprived of basic human needs, based entirely on their non-Jewishness.
It really and truly can’t get any more completely fucked up than this, right?
But wait, it does! This is all the fault of the people attempting to bring humanitarian aid. Israel was just defending itself, just as it was doing with Operation Cast Lead, and when peace activist Rachel Corrie was crushed under an IDF bulldozer in 2003, and when 34 U.S. sailors were killed and another 173 were wounded when Israel attacked the USS Liberty in 1967.
It’s never Israel’s fault.
Oh for fuck’s sake now I’m exhausted again. Just read Mark Steel’s piece below.
Of course, they were asking for it
by Mark Steel
Wednesday, 2 June 2010
To strengthen their case the Israelis have released a photo of the weapons they found on board, (which amount to some knives and tools and wooden sticks) that the naive might think you’d expect to find on any ship, but the more astute will recognise as exactly what you’d carry if you were planning to defeat the Israeli army. It’s an armoury smaller than you’d find in the average toolshed in a garden in Cirencester, which goes to show the Israelis had better destroy Cirencester quickly as an essential act of self-defence.
It’s a shame they weren’t more imaginative, as they could have said “We also discovered a deadly barometer, a ship’s compass, which could not only be frisbeed at someone’s head but even had markings to help the assailant know which direction he was throwing it, and a set of binoculars that could easily be converted into a ray-gun.”
That would be as logical as the statement from the Israeli PM’s spokesman – “We made every possible effort to avoid this incident.” Because the one tiny thing they forgot to do to avoid this incident was not send in armed militia from helicopters in the middle of the night and shoot people. I must be a natural at this sort of technique because I often go all day without climbing off a helicopter and shooting people, and I’m not even making every possible effort. Politicians and commentators worldwide repeat a version of this line. They’re aware a nation has sent its militia to confront people carrying provisions for the desperate, in the process shooting several of them dead, and yet they angrily blame the dead ones. One typical headline yesterday read “Activists got what they wanted – confrontation.” It’s an attitude so deranged it deserves to be registered as a psychosis, something like “Reverse Slaughter Victim Confusion Syndrome”.
Israel and its supporters claim that Viva Palestina, made up of people who collect the donated food, cement and items for providing basic amenities such as toilets, and transport them to Gaza, wanted the violence all along. Because presumably they must have been thinking “Hezbollah couldn’t beat them, but that’s because unlike us they didn’t have a ballcock and several boxes of plum tomatoes”.
One article told us the flotilla was full of “Thugs spoiling for a confrontation”, and then accused them of being “Less about aid and more about PR. Indeed, on board was Swedish novelist Henning Mankell.” So were they thugs or about PR? Did they have a thugs’ section and a PR quarter, or did they all muck in, the novelist diverting the soldiers with his characterisation while the thugs attacked them with a lethal spirit level?
But some defenders of Israel are so blind to what happens in front of them there’s nothing at all they wouldn’t jump to defend. Israel could blow up a cats home and within five minutes they’d be yelling “How do we know the cats weren’t smuggling semtex in their fur for Hamas?”
If this incident had been carried about by Iran, or anyone we were trying to portray as an enemy, so much condemnation would have been spewed out it would have created a vast cloud of outrage that airlines would be unable to fly through.
But as it’s Israel, most governments offer a few diplomatic words that blame no one, but accept the deaths are “regrettable”. They might as well have picked any random word from the dictionary, so the news would tell us “William Hague described the deaths as ‘hexagonal'”, and a statement from the US senate said “It’s all very confusing. In future let’s hope they make every effort to avoid a similar incident.”
America Psycho 