It’s been a long time but worth remembering, if you can, that when the Twin Towers and Building 7 at the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001, the whole world watched in horror. The events of that day were repeated on television over and over and over again, to the point where they became afterimages lodged in people’s minds.
As a result, although the buildings were not brought down by the impact of planes (no plane hit Building 7) but by explosives planted in the buildings (see this and this, among extensive evidence), most people thought otherwise, just as they thought that the subsequent linked anthrax attacks were directed by Osama bin Laden when they were eventually proven to have originated from a U.S. military lab (thus an inside job), and, as a result of a massive Bush administration/corporate media propaganda campaign, most Americans supported the invasion of Afghanistan, the subsequent invasion of Iraq, and decades of endless wars that continue to this day, bringing us to the edge of nuclear war with Iran and Russia.
It is impossible to understand the United States’ full-fledged support today for Israel’s genocide in the Middle East without understanding this history. Israel’s genocide is the United States’ genocide; they cannot be separated.
All these wars involve the machinations of the neo-conservative clique that in 1997 formed the Project for the New American Century that ran George W. Bush’s administration and whose protégées have come to exert great control of the foreign policies of Democratic and Republican administrations since. It is not that they lacked power before this, as a study of American foreign policy as far back as the Lyndon Johnson administration and its non-response to Israel’s 1967 attack on the U.S. Liberty confirms.
Contrary to the widespread claims that Israel runs U.S. Middle East foreign policy, I think it is important to emphasize that the reverse is true.
It is convenient to claim the tail wags the dog, but it is false.
Israel’s war crimes are U.S. war crimes. If the U.S. wanted to stop Israel’s genocide and expansion of war throughout the region, it could do so immediately, for Israel is totally reliant on U.S. support for its existence – as they like to say, “It’s existential.”
All the news to the contrary is propaganda. It is a sly game of responsibility ping-pong: shift the blame, keep the audience guessing as they hit their little hollow ball back and forth.
Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time. Such geo-political control is linked to the United States’ endless war on Russia and the control of natural resources throughout the vast region (a look at a map is requisite), stretching from the Middle East to southwest Asia up through the Black and Caspian Seas through Ukraine into Russia.
In both cases, the attacks of September 11, 2001 and Israel’s genocide of Palestinians whose ultimate target is Iran (America’s key enemy in the region as far back as the CIA’s 1953 coup d’état against Iran’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh), savage wars of extermination have been promoted through decades of carefully orchestrated propaganda. In the former case, through the mainstream corporate media’s magic of repetitive cinematic images, and in the latter, through their absence. To be shown photos of many thousands of dead and mutilated Palestinian children does not serve the U.S./Zionist’s interests. Propaganda’s methods must be flexible. Show, conceal.
The September 11th attacks and the current genocide, each in its own way, have been justified and paid for with similar but different credit cards without spending limits, the so-called wars on terror waged on the visual credit card of planes hitting buildings preceded and followed by endless pictures of Osama bin Laden, and the genocide of Palestinians on the holocaust credit card minus images of slaughtered Palestinians or any awareness of the terrorist history of the Zionist’s century-long racial nationalist settler movement of “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians from their land.
To know this, one has to read books, but they have been replaced by cell phones, functional illiteracy being the norm, even for college graduates who are treated to four years of wokeness education and anti-intellectualism that reduces their thinking to mush and graduates them with sciolistic minds at best. I am being kind.
The eradication of historical knowledge and the devaluation of the written word are key to ignorance of both issues. Digital media and cell phones are the new books, all few hundred words on an issue conveying information that conveys ignorance. Guy DeBord put it succinctly: “That which the spectacle ceases to speak of for three days no longer exists.” Amnesia is the norm.
To which I might add: that which the mass media spectacle continues to speak of or show images of for many days exists, even if it doesn’t. It exists in the minds of virtual people for whom images and headlines create reality. The electronic media is not only addictive but hypnotically effective, producing cyber people divorced from the material world. News and information have become a form of terrorism used to implode all mental defenses, similar to the floors at the World Trade Center that went down boom, boom, boom.
The war crimes of US/Israel are readily available for viewing outside the coverage of the corporate mainstream media. Most of the world views them, but these are the unreal people, the ones who don’t count as human beings. These war crimes are massive, ruthless, and committed proudly and without an ounce of shame. To face this fact is not acceptable.
Those who pretend ignorance of them are guilty of bad faith.
Those who support either Harris or Trump are guilty of bad faith twice over, acting as if either one does not support genocide or that genocide is a minor matter in the larger scheme of things.
Choosing “the lesser of two evils” is therefore an act of radical evil hiding behind the mask of civic duty.
That it is commonplace only confirms these words from the English playwright Harold Pinter’s extraordinary Nobel Address in 2005:
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El
Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.
Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Little has changed since 2005, except that these crimes have increased along with the propaganda denying them, together with vastly increased censorship – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Russia via Ukraine, etc. – all targets of U.S. bombs, just like Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen, etc. Now the U.S. has brought the world to the brink of nuclear war and the voting public is all worked up over choosing between candidates supporting genocide and the massively expanded Israel attack on neighboring countries. It is a frightening spectacle of moral indifference and stupidity as we await the Israel/U.S. bombing of Iran and Iran’s response.
Yet I ask myself and I ask you: Is there a connection between the voting public’s support for these war criminals and attention deficit disorder, amnesia, and dementia?
Or is this embrace of the demonic twins’ – US/Israel – foreign policy a sign of something far worse? A death wish?
Soul death?
We’ve moved since 9/11 from the controlled demolition of those World Trade Center buildings to what appears for all intents and purposes to be the controlled demolition of Western societies themselves in unison across the globe. We have World Economic Forum young global leaders graduates in government positions – like Macron, Trudeau and Samantha Power – to Critical Social Justice luminaries like Ibram X Kendi – all doing their part in planting the explosives and setting the detonators. One wonders who might be left to sift through the debris if this cadre of idiots continues to influence policy in the West. I am personally much more concerned with the prospects for nuclear war should the Democrats retain power – than if Trump regains the presidency. If that earlier 4+ years of Russiagate nonsense during Trump’s first term taught us anything – it is that Trump is not considered an acceptable face for American empire by the deep state. That Kamala is should terrify us all. Perhaps most frightening is that in spite of a lifetime of being far to the left of the Democratic Party and my progressive friends and relatives – those “progressives” I know seem so under the thrall of Trump Derangement Syndrome that any attempt to discuss actual “real world” issues like Ukraine, nuclear war and Gaza are all met with the same brain dead mantra – “BUT TRUMP!” I suppose I should have seen this coming when “woke” progressives started supporting the idea that lesbians can have a penis. : /
‘ . . . this imaginative geography. . .’
TIME MAGAZINE
THE SURPRISING ROOTS OF CULTURAL IMPERIALISM IN THE MIDDLE EAST
EDWARD SAID
TIME
April 16, 1979
One of the strangest, least examined and most persistent of human habits is the absolute division made between East and West, Orient and Occident. Almost entirely “Western” in origin, this imaginative geography that splits the world into two unequal, fundamentally opposite spheres has brought forth more myths, more detailed ignorance and more ambitions than any other perception of difference. For centuries Europeans and Americans have spellbound themselves with Oriental mysticism, Oriental passivity, Oriental mentalities. Translated into policy, displayed as knowledge, presented as entertainment in travelers’ reports, novels, paintings, music or films, this “Orientalism” has existed virtually unchanged as a kind of daydream that could often justify Western colonial adventures or military conquest. On the “Marvels of the East” (as the Orient was known in the Middle Ages) a fantastic edifice was constructed, invested heavily with Western fear, desire, dreams of power and, of course, a very partial knowledge. And placed in this structure has been “Islam,” a great religion and a culture certainly, but also an Occidental myth, part of what Disraeli once called “the great Asiatic mystery.”
As represented for Europe by Muhammad and his followers, Islam appeared out of Arabia in the 7th century and rapidly spread in all directions. For almost a millennium Christian Europe felt itself challenged (as indeed it was) by this last monotheistic religion, which claimed to complete its two predecessors. Perplexingly grand and “Oriental,” incorporating elements of Judeo-Christianity, Islam never fully submitted to the West’s power. Its various states and empires always provided the West with formidable political and cultural contestants—and with opportunities to affirm a “superior” Occidental identity. Thus, for the West, to understand Islam has meant trying to convert its variety into a monolithic undeveloping essence, its originality into a debased copy of Christian culture, its people into fearsome caricatures.
Early Christian polemicists against Islam used the Prophet’s human person as their butt, accusing him of whoring, sedition, charlatanry. As writing about Islam and the Orient burgeoned—60,000 books between 1800 and 1950—European powers occupied large swatches of “Islamic” territory, arguing that since Orientals knew nothing about democracy and were essentially passive, it was the “civilizing mission” of the Occident, expressed in the strict programs of despotic modernization, to finally transform the Orient into a nice replica of the West. Even Marx seems to have believed this.
There were, however, great Orientalist scholars; there were genuine attempts, like that of Richard Burton [British explorer who translated the Arabian Nights], at coming to terms with Islam. Still, gross ignorance persisted, as it will whenever fear of the different gets translated into attempts at domination. The U.S. inherited the Orientalist legacy, and uncritically employed it in its universities, mass media, popular culture, imperial policy. In films and cartoons, Muslim Arabs, for example, are represented either as bloodthirsty mobs, or as hooknosed, lecherous sadists. Academic experts decreed that in Islam everything is Islamic, which amounted to the edifying notions that there was such a thing as an “Islamic mind,” that to understand the politics of Algeria one had best consult the Koran, that “they” (the Muslims) had no understanding of democracy, only of repression and medieval obscurantism. Conversely, it was argued that so long as repression was in the U.S. interest, it was not Islamic but a form of modernization.
The worst misjudgments followed. As recently as 1967 the head of the Middle East Studies Association wrote a report for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asserting that the region including the Middle East and North Africa was not a center of cultural achievement, nor was it likely to become one in the near future. The study of the region or its languages, therefore, did not constitute its own reward so far as modern culture is concerned. High school textbooks routinely produced descriptions of Islam like the following: “It was started by a wealthy businessman of Arabia called Muhammad. He claimed that he was a prophet. He found followers among other Arabs. He told them that they were picked to rule the world.” Whether Palestinian Arabs lost their land and political rights to Zionism, or Iranian poets were tortured by the SAVAK, little time was spent in the West wondering if Muslims suffered pain, would resist oppression or experienced love and joy; to Westerners, “they” were different from “us” since Orientals did not feel about life as “we” did.
No one saw that Islam varied from place to place, subject to both history and geography. Islam was unhesitatingly considered to be an abstraction, never an experience. No one bothered to judge Muslims in political, social, anthropological terms that were vital and nuanced, rather than crude and provocative. Suddenly it appeared that “Islam” was back when Ayatullah Khomeini, who derives from a long tradition of opposition to an outrageous monarchy, stood on his national, religious and political legitimacy as an Islamic righteous man. Menachem Begin took himself to be speaking for the West when he said he feared this return to the Middle Ages, even as he covered Israeli occupation of Arab land with Old Testament authorizations. Western leaders worried about their oil, so little appreciated by the Islamic hordes who thronged the streets to topple the Light of the Aryans.
Were Orientalists at last beginning to wonder about their “Islam,” which they said had taught the faithful never to resist unlawful tyranny, never to prize any values over sex and money, never to disturb fate? Did anyone stop to doubt that F-15 planes were the answer to all our worries about “Islam”? Was Islamic punishment, which tantalized the press, more irreducibly vicious than, say, napalming Asian peasants?
We need understanding to note that repression is not principally Islamic or Oriental but a reprehensible aspect of the human phenomenon. “Islam” cannot explain everything in Africa and Asia, just as “Christianity” cannot explain Chile or South Africa. If Iranian workers, Egyptian students, Palestinian farmers resent the West or the U.S., it is as a concrete response to a specific policy injuring them as human beings. Certainly a European or American would be entitled to feel that the Islamic multitudes are underdeveloped; but he would also have to concede that underdevelopment is a relative cultural and economic judgment and not mainly “Islamic” in nature.
Under the vast idea called Islam, which the faithful look to for spiritual nourishment in their numerous ways, an equally vast, rich life passes, as detailed and as complex as any. For comprehension of that life Westerners need what Orientalist Scholar Louis Massignon called a science of compassion, knowledge without domination, common sense not mythology. In Iran and elsewhere Islam has not simply “returned”; it has always been there, not as an abstraction or a war cry but as part of a way people believe, give thanks, have courage and so on. Will it not ease our fear to accept the fact that people do the same things inside as well as outside Islam, that Muslims live in history and in our common world, not simply in the Islamic context?
https://time.com/archive/6846142/special-report-islam-orientalism-and-the-west/
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Your essay concludes with a choice of possible explanations for the current state of affairs. I believe the correct answer lies behind door number two.
Soul death for many of the still-living seems an already accomplished fact at this point, with the enormous and ongoing harvesting of loosh the original intent of the authors. Our culture has become metaphysically blind by design, and, as you note, the situation is only getting worse. Any resolution, if at all possible, will probably be cataclysmic. A final banquet, so to speak.
Your comments on the media are very prescient. Few of us are in position to directly change the course of our foreign policy. But we are in a position to know about it and have an opinion and try to steer it through discourse towards something less genocidal. But our media has highjacked that ability by dumbing us down with less relevant but more addictive content. There are very few people left in the world that I can have an intelligent or lengthy conversation with on most topics. Most people’s understanding of most of their world is now just an assemblage of free floating soundbites or unknown provenance that they cannot formulate a coherent second sentence about when pressed for details. It’s like a mass mind neutering has happened. Such that when I look around me I just really don’t see the character or will amongst the proletariat to ever drag us out of this. Do I need to point out that most still would or still do support and vote for the same people who did all these things? That nobody went to jail for 9/11? When I tell people I don’t vote for this reason they look at me like I have 3 heads. I swear I can almost see the sign flashing “vote = good” Newspeak inside their heads. Palestinians may be outnumbered and outmanned but they know their enemy and they know what the battle is. Americans are just completely lost yet foolishly self righteous about it. It will be a long road out of this should we ever make it.
Seems to me that it’s not all that easy to determine who is in control of US policy, both in general and in regards to Israel. Yes, the US could stop Israel in theory, but not if the people in charge of the US government are being bribed or blackmailed by Israeli interests, or if their primary loyalties are to Israel, which seems to be the case with those who who are running the Biden Administrion (Blinken, Hochstein, Yellen, Garland, etc.).
EC – as you wrote that the genocide cannot be separated between Israel and US, the issue of who wags who becomes irrelevant – as there is an overall entity who cares not a whit how many victims it kills as long as they’re humans – in fact, the more the merrier….. for him! Furthermore, your whole essay has made the case – so thank you for all your insightful thoughts and the deep historical evidence you presented.
God has a RED-LINE – as it was in 70 AD – but not seen by most pundits.
Our enemy is not left, right, neocon etcetc – they’re just different manifestations of DaSynagogue of Satan – DSOS – and among them, the most dangerous enemies we have are DaConservatives – smug, self-righteous, virtue signaling know-it-all cucks, but dumber than rocks. How do I know? I was one!
“From the least to the greatest,
all are greedy for gain;
prophets and priests alike,
all practice deceit.
They dress the wound of my people
as though it were not serious.
‘Peace, peace,’ they say,
when there is no peace.” – Jeremiah explains what most authors miss when comparing political labels.
And what I’ve found among almost all secular writers is their utter ignorance of religious matters. In fact, their ignorance might exceed the ignorance of most Churchians…..whom DaSecularists mistake for Christians.
Dumb and dumber?
Both OT and NT – if read systematically as a study in itself – reveal a thread from Genesis to Revelation.
It should become evident in time that when Jesus was reminding DaPharisees constantly that they did not believe Moses and in fact were trying to kill Him – and thus were NOT abiding by the OT. The Talmud is their bible! Today’s jews are the spiritual descendants of yesterday’s Pharisees!
What I have learned over the years – systematically – is that the narrative thread from Genesis to Revelation is all about Jesus the Messiah – including plenty of mayhem of all kinds, the prophets warning Israel of their ultimate demise which occurred in 70 AD. Jeremiah was just one of them.
One more thing – Christianity is NOT etiquette – https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2021/03/in-essenceit-always-wasand-still-isa.html?m=0 – you can start here.
And if you really want to dig deeper, insert JUDAISM into the search window of DaLimbraw Library and read for hours, if not days.
Now, getting back to who wags who – if we’ve identified DaSynagogue of Satan as THE AGENCY IN CHARGE for Old Scratch Satan – does it matter if it’s Israel or DaUS or anyone else who ACTS AS HIS SERVANT? BTW – DaLimbraw Library has a connect-the-dots summary of WHO ARE THE SERVANTS OF SATAN – you might be surprised! They actually outnumber jews by millions in Western Civilization.
You decide!
Hello Crush….where did this religion come from? Who wrote this religion?
My partner asked the question; who said god was a man? The answer she received was incoherent! I might think by now, we would have transcended all of that…., confusion.
Who are the historians? Thousands of years later, with the world already having gone to hell, we should have questioned all of this. So what information have we been lacking ? Of course we cannot answer that question….easily.
How do we know, how could we possibly prove various cosmological theories about particles in relation to other particles. How did these particles come about? Are we all simply particles who believe man-made theories about activities in the universe, on this planet?
I have no answers or theories. Start with simply being conscious and observe! Why do we hold onto our fears? I see many signs on people’s lawns. I want to cry. What are these people hoping for. Or perhaps they think signs are neat lawn ornaments. Who knows? What responsibility should we take?
Do we have the courage to take any responsibility toward any of the threats? If you were hungry and saw food, would you question yourself for wanting that food? Would you attempt to obtain that food? What are the limitations?
The 1976 movie Network is more relevant today than ever. Howard Beal, played by Peter Finch said, ‘but first, you must get mad!’ People are afraid of THEIR emotions. Express passion, it is accused of yelling or anger. Well if no one can get at least upset by now, I would say they are simply the walking dead! It is okay to demand sanity !
Spot on Joseph.
Nuff said.
Hello, Very well written, thank you,
Shortly after 911 my father in law sent me a hook written about 911 by a distinguished college professor. He asked many questions. For example; Why was the structural steel from the collapsed buildings sold to foreign metal dealers so quickly?
I tried to share the book with my friends but none would read it so I sent it back to my friendly father in law with hope he had another friend to send it to.
Recognizing political parties as you describe, Consider writing in Nobody or Uncommitted for every elected federal office this November 5th.
Make a new nonviolent revolution, Create a new nonviolent nation. nation.
Convene an online constituent assembly to choose a location for a new capitol. Use computer assisted real intelligence- CARI.
Apply ti set up technical input and financing by BRICS New Development Bank, if necessity develops.
Write in Nobody or Uncommitted for every elected federal office this November 5th. Make a nonviolent revolution. Create a new nonviolent nation,
War IS the BIGGEST bUSiness and the US is in the bUSi$$$$$$$$$$$ of war.
Yes, for further explication of who’s wagging who . . . https://scheerpost.com/2024/10/08/michael-hudson-and-richard-wolff-middle-east-exploding-ukraine-crumbling-us-take-action/
Might find my comment also interesting
The State of Israel is our 51st state. Unofficially. Based on the standing ovation Netanyahu recently received in Congress, we don’t need to have a Presidential election next month either. Netanyahu is our defacto President.
Goddess help us.
Hang on, M: Australia is the 51st State. Though in Japan a common enough response is that Japan is he 51st state – along with dozens of other states… Edwin Curtin puts it all together so beautifully. And yes – it was not just the twin towers in perfect demolition collapse but the inexplicable demolition collapse of Building 7. Mossad – right?