CARTOON: Five Things Liberals Say To Avoid A Real Position On Gaza
When someone is murdered with malicious intent, we don’t heave a heavy sigh and shed a tear and move on — we prosecute their murderer.
Cartoon by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
By Caitlan Johnstone
Caitlan’s Newsletter (2/1/24)
Here are five noises western liberals often make to avoid having to take a real position on Gaza:
1. “It’s heartbreaking!”
2. “It’s complicated!”
3. “BUT TRUMP!”
4. “I really hope there can be peace there someday!”
5. “I support a two-state solution!”
Let’s talk about these a bit.
“It’s heartbreaking!”
Liberals love talking about how “sad” and “heartbreaking” what’s happening in Gaza is like it’s some kind of natural disaster, some tragically tragic tragedy that their government has been passively witnessing instead of actively facilitating. It lets them express their progressive humanitarian feelings without actually taking a meaningful political position against what’s being done in their name with their tax dollars and with their tacit consent.
In reality the genocide in Gaza is not sad or heartbreaking or tragic; those are words you use for diseases and accidents. When someone is murdered with malicious intent, we don’t heave a heavy sigh and shed a tear and move on — we prosecute their murderer. It isn’t raining bombs in Gaza because that’s just the unfortunate weather there today, those bombs are being dropped by Israel with genocidal intent with the full backing of the United States and its allies. This is a crime which requires outrage and punishment, not empty crocodile tears.
“It’s complicated!”
No it isn’t. An apartheid regime has been oppressing and abusing an ethnic group which doesn’t receive the same rights and treatment as others, and now they’re dropping bombs on a population trapped in a giant concentration camp. If it was Jewish people enclosed in Gaza while any other ethnicity rained military explosives on them for four months, no liberal in the world would have trouble recognizing what they’re seeing and calling it what it is.
“BUT TRUMP!”
Push a Biden supporter hard enough on what their president is doing in Gaza and eventually they’ll start babbling about how bad Donald Trump is. As though Trump being bad somehow negates the depravity of backing an active genocide. Or as though backing an active genocide is an excusable offense if it means a little more student debt forgiveness or something.
Democrats have no way to reconcile Gaza with what they believe about themselves and what values they supposedly hold, so when confronted with the horrifying reality of what their president is doing in the middle east they’re left with no option but to plunge their heads into the sand and scream “TRUMP!!!” as loud as they can. Nothing has exposed the true nature of the Democratic Party like a Democrat president running for re-election during a US-backed genocide.
“I really hope there can be peace there someday!”
Like “It’s tragic!”, this one replaces a meaningful political position with empty emotional fluff to create the false impression that the liberal has said something relevant which aligns with their stated values and ideology.
By saying you want peace but refusing to say how you want the peace to come about, the “peace” you purport to support could mean anything. If Israel bombs Gaza into rubble and drives survivors into refugee camps in the Sinai desert, they could call that “peace” because there won’t be a war anymore. If Israel murders everyone in Gaza, they can call that “peace” because the bombs are no longer falling. Even going back to the status quo of October 6 wouldn’t be “peace”, it would just be returning to the abusive conditions which gave rise to October 7.
Saying you want “peace” without talking about immediate ceasefires and negotiated agreements is just saying you want Israel to keep doing what it’s doing until it decides it’s done enough.
“I support a two-state solution!”
The “two-state solution” is functionally just a psychological box that liberals mentally tick off so they can pretend they have a real position on Israel-Palestine. Israeli leaders publicly spit on the notion of a Palestinian state with its own military and national sovereignty, and there is no political wherewithal to make such a thing happen. It’s nothing more than a conceptual construct which lets liberals feel nice about their personal politics without actually taking a stand against the western-backed tyrannical power structure that is the state of Israel.
In reality there cannot be peace until Israel ceases to be an abusive apartheid ethnostate, until it and its allies pay massive reparations to the Palestinians, and until all the wrongs of the past are made right. This is entirely possible, but it would be a massive, massive effort toward a goal that would make the current status quo of Israel-Palestine completely unrecognizable from what it currently is. Merely flicking an intellectual thumbs-up to empty notions about a “two-state solution” is just more liberal psychological compartmentalization.
Other popular noises liberals make to avoid taking a real position on Gaza include “Something something antisemitism!” and “It’s just Netanyahu and a few far-right jerks making things bad!” The specific words don’t matter much, because liberals will make whatever noises they need to make to avoid the crushing weight of cognitive dissonance and resist the increasingly loud demands from reality that they dramatically restructure their worldview.
Link to story and 5-minute audio of column
Biden Says The US "Does Not Seek Conflict In The Middle East" While Actively Dropping Bombs There
Saying the US does not seek conflict in the middle east is like saying the Kardashians do not seek attention. It’s like saying Jeff Bezos doesn’t seek money. It’s like saying the Hamburglar doesn’t seek hamburgers.
By Caitlin Johnstone
Caitlan’s Newsletter (2/2/24)
The Biden administration has begun its latest bombing campaign in the middle east, reportedly dropping over 125 munitions on more than 85 Iranian and Shia militia targets in Iraq and Syria on Friday.
The mainstream press have been falling all over themselves to describe the strikes as “retaliatory” in nature, framing it as a provoked response to a drone attack which killed three US troops at a base on the border of Jordan and Syria. Which is a bit odd, given that this supposed “retaliation” is being directed at a nation which the US government itself admits is not known to have been involved in said drone attack at all.
While US Central Command says the strikes targeted “Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Quds Force and affiliated militia groups,” the US has already openly admitted that it has no evidence Iran was behind the drone attack. On Monday Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh admitted that there was no information showing that Iran had actually ordered or orchestrated the attack, saying only that Iran “bears responsibility” for the strike because it has been supporting such groups in the region. This position was later confirmed by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and by President Biden himself.
Asked by the press on Thursday how much Iran knew in advance about the drone attack by Iraqi militants, Austin said “we don’t know, but it really doesn’t matter because Iran sponsors these groups.”
Austin was almost telling the truth. Yes it’s true the US has no knowledge of any Iranian involvement in the deaths of those three US troops, and yes it is true that it doesn’t matter to the US whether it did or didn’t. But the real reason it “doesn’t matter” has nothing to do with Iran sponsoring militia groups which align with its interests. In reality, “it really doesn’t matter” whether Iran was behind the attack because Iran is the most powerful non-US-aligned state in the middle east, and for that reason the US has spent generations seizing every opportunity to harm and subvert it and its interests in the region. This is just one more opportunity for the US empire to do what it always does in the middle east.
Conflict is what we do
It is a bit odd, then, that the US president announced the beginning of this new series of airstrikes with a statement which claims “The United States does not seek conflict in the Middle East or anywhere else in the world.” Conflict in the middle east is what the US empire does. The entire US empire is held together by endless conflict, especially in resource-rich regions where strategic control is necessary to retain planetary hegemony. The US empire is conflict.
Saying the US does not seek conflict in the middle east is like saying the Kardashians do not seek attention. It’s like saying Jeff Bezos doesn’t seek money. It’s like saying the Hamburglar doesn’t seek hamburgers. It’s kind of their thing. To make such a ridiculous claim while actively raining military explosives upon the middle east, in “retaliation” for an attack which the people you’re bombing didn’t even commit, is just extra icing on the cake of ridiculousness.
From Gaza to Iraq to Syria to Iran to Yemen, conflict in the middle east is the US empire’s bread and butter. The most murderous power structure on the planet continually paints itself as a poor little victim of any backlash against its abuses and as an innocent passive witness to the suffering it orchestrates, but nobody who’s involved in that many acts of violence has ever been interested in peace.
Link to story and 4-minute audio
Ooo, powerful cartooning! I want to borrow this for my next blog. I might just send it along to the Toledo City Council that refuses to vote on a Ceasefire in Gaza resolution. The Dems really give themselves away with their actions/lack of actions.