Palestinians search the rubble of destroyed buildings following an Israeli strike, as battles between Israel and the Hamas movement continue for the sixth consecutive day in the city of Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on October 12, 2023.© Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
October 12, 2023
This is the text of TFF PressInfo 723 sent out earlier today.
I suggest that you subscribe to our free about-weekly newsletter here.
In civilisational terms, war is a backward, primitive thing; it solves no conflicts and creates no security – only hate, which fuels more war.
It’s a system or structural evil – much more than a human evil.
Equally primitive and uncultured is, of course, the type of black-and-white, simplified narrative: there is only one evil party – the Palestinians and Hamas. The war has only one cause, and we need neither history nor conflict analysis to understand anything.
Further, we don’t need sym- and empathy with innocent suffering human beings on all sides – only with one side’s.
All that is needed is politically correct emotionalism and side-taking – however, guaranteed to make everything worse and get more innocent people killed.
EU boss von der Leyen has the guts to declare that “Europe stands with Israel” – which ‘Europe,’? And were you ever elected by ‘Europe’ to speak on its behalf, Madam?
[Addendum Oct 13: After publishing this, I’ve been alerted to the fact that the indefatigable European peace MP, Irish Clare Daly, made exactly that point much more eloquently than I did above on Oct 8, actually asking von der Leyen to shut up because she doesn’t represent ‘Europe’ at all].
It’s become too easy, showing too much intellectual and moral laziness: Condemnation requires no knowledge or complex understanding, but it speaks to kakistocrats’ minds.
It’s Kitsch politics!
In Ukraine, EU/NATO countries side with the underdog that has been invaded. In this war, it sides with topdog Israel, the apartheid occupier with nukes who has created history’s largest prison with the full blessing of the declining West.
From another perspective, it is a huge blow to Israel and the US – a complete ‘intelligence’ failure. If that is what it was.
When Israel’s occupation > extermination policy has run its course – “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” plus total ethnic cleansing and flattening of dwellings – NATO/EU governments will have drowned in a blood-drenched unsolvable moral dilemma of their own creation, but they won’t even recognise it.
Because that would require both knowledge and ethics – and those things are even more depleted than their arsenals of weapons.
Bonus videos
Democracy Now’s report of October 11, 2023
Mustafa Barghouti: Israel’s Siege & Bombing of Gaza Are War Crimes. Is Ethnic Cleansing Next?
Demonstration in Amman, Jordan, in support of Hamas.
