His Innocence the 43rd President of the USA, on the Hamas attacks of October 7
Bush is the last person in the world anyone should be asking what to do. Literally dead last; there are eight billion people more qualified. The agendas Bush set out in the wake of 9/11 plunged the middle east into violence and chaos killing millions and displacing tens of millions, all supposedly in response to an attack which killed three thousand. What is this man doing holding a microphone and publicly opining on what Israel should do in response to the Hamas attack?
The Palestine issue is not complicated; an apartheid regime abuses and oppresses an indigenous ethnic group who don’t have the same rights as others. The only reason anyone thinks it’s complicated is because they assume if it were simple, the news would have told them so.
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Most people with a view on the matter approve of my frequently citing Caitlin Johnstone but every now and again I get pushback from folk claiming she never tells them anything they hadn’t already figured out.
This is unbearably smug. More seriously it betrays a vice I see over and over in radical camps: the hubristic sin of being less interested in the change they and I agree is needed than in being of the cognoscenti.
If our sincere desire is to effect change on this sorry planet we soon see that a huge obstacle – some say the biggest of all – is dominant ideology. As Marx put it, the ruling ideas of every age are those of its ruling class. So those who challenge dominant ideology are forced onto the margins. Their writings tend either to be simplistic and easily refuted, else dense and hard to digest precisely because to the power-conditioned mind they are counterintuitive in a world where ‘common sense’ is ideologically saturated.
Back in January of this year I featured Caitlin in a post, We are stardust, its thrust her insistence on the importance of the ‘spiritual’ side of our humanity. That’s another reason I hold her in high regard but more relevant here is that:
It is Caitlin’s mix of passion with the ability to state counterintuitive truths (counter, that is, to dominant narratives) in ways which make them seem simple common sense that has her featuring so often on my masthead, and in my posts.
Right now, every section of our systemically corrupt media is drilling into us that the Hamas attacks a week ago were unprovoked evil incarnate. That’s nonsense, as I have tried to show in a number of posts since October 7. But how many of those who think their understanding leaves Caitlin in the dust can pen challenges to that nonsense as well as she does? Like Russell Brand – of whose broad brush exposures of power I hear similarly snobbish put-downs – Caitlin is a polemicist second to none.
Every government in the western world, and every wing of its corporate media, is in overdrive on the black is white .. lies are truth .. war is peace .. arse is elbow .. spin that Israel – despite flagrantly and indisputably committing war crimes this very minute – is the innocent victim here. Even more surreal in its Orwellian inversions is the notion that once again Uncle Sam’s altruism, and that of his vassals allies in Europe and Five Eyes, is why it stands “shoulder to shoulder” with a plucky Jewish State besieged by barbarians. 1
Cutting into that media frenzy of the horrifyingly surreal, with the case for seeing Washington as having common purpose with the Israeli government in the unfolding genocide, here – yes, again! – is Caitlin, writing today on the truth that:
The US Is Just As Culpable As Israel For The Atrocities Committed In Gaza 2
These abuses are being perpetrated using US weapons, US funding and US consent. Washington could end this mass atrocity with a word, and instead they’re fully aligning themselves behind it.
The Israeli government dropped thousands of leaflets on Gaza telling everyone who lives in the northern part of the strip that they have 24 hours to evacuate to the southern part, and then bombed the people who were trying to evacuate.
United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric denounced the evacuation order, saying the UN “considers it impossible for such a movement to take place without devastating humanitarian consequences.” Many Palestinians have said they’re going to stay where they are because they have nowhere safe to go, despite being told by Israel they must leave if they want to “save their lives”.
We’re about to see the death and destruction get much, much worse in Gaza, and it’s already very, very bad. As of this writing the official death toll from Israeli airstrikes in Gaza is speeding past 1,900, a number which includes 614 children. The primary job of Israel apologists in the coming days will be producing and circulating narratives explaining why this self-evidently terrible thing is actually perfectly fine and acceptable.
It’s so incredibly obvious what we’re looking at here. The only thing putting a wobble on people’s perception is the immense amount of propaganda distortion the media is churning out on this issue, plus the fact that the demographics look a bit different from what history has conditioned people to watch out for. If there were two million Jewish people trapped by Christians in a giant concentration camp and placed under total siege, being told that half of them had 24 hours to relocate into the other half or be killed, nobody would have any confusion about what they were witnessing.
And top-down commands are being issued within the US government to support this massacre unconditionally.
The Huffington Post reports that the State Department has been circulating internal emails telling staff to avoid calls for peace, instructing them to refrain from using phrases like “de-escalation/ceasefire,” “end to violence/bloodshed” and “restoring calm.”
Asked about progressive congressional members calling for a ceasefire, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “we believe they are wrong, we believe they’re repugnant, and we believe they’re disgraceful.”
On the question of whether there are any potential Israeli actions that the White House would not tolerate, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan told reporters “I’m not here to draw red lines or issue warnings or give lectures to anybody.”
So be perfectly clear, the US government is fully behind this massacre, and is just as culpable for everything that happens in Gaza as the Israeli government. These abuses are being perpetrated using US weapons, US funding and US consent. Washington could end this mass atrocity with a word, and instead they’re fully aligning themselves behind it. Israel’s crimes in Gaza are not meaningfully separate from the crimes of the US war machine.
This is just a continuation and extension of the violence and bloodshed the US government has been inflicting around the world for generations. There’s a clip of George W Bush going around from a California event on Tuesday in which, for some bizarre, unfathomable reason, the former president was asked to provide his opinion on what Israel should do in response to the Hamas attack on October 7.
Bush said pretty much what you’d expect him to say: “You’re dealing with cold-blooded killers,” “negotiating with killers is not an option,” “one side is guilty.” The same book he’s been reciting from since September 11, 2001. What I find much more interesting is, why is anyone asking the absolute worst person you could possibly ask about what should be done in response to such an attack?
I mean, Bush is literally the very last person in the entire world who anyone should be asking what to do in this situation. Literally dead last; there are eight billion people walking this earth right now who are infinitely more qualified to answer such questions than George W Bush. The agendas Bush set out to advance in the wake of 9/11 plunged the middle east into violence and chaos which wound up killing millions and displacing tens of millions, all supposedly in response to an attack which killed three thousand. What is this man doing holding a microphone and publicly opining on what Israel should do in response to the Hamas attack?
As we discussed earlier, 9/11 marked the beginning of some of the most deadly and catastrophic decisions ever made in US history. Israel has demonstrated that it is eager to repeat these profoundly depraved decisions to the furthest extent possible, and the US has demonstrated that it will fully support it in doing so.
The is because the United States never learned any moral lessons from its warmongering after 9/11 — if it had, George W Bush would be sitting in a prison cell, and the US wouldn’t be backing a mass atrocity in Gaza. The US-centralized empire is the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth, of which Israel’s criminality is just one component.
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- For why Washington and the west at large stands by Israel, however embarrassing the apologetics for its ‘excesses’, see Israel: a beachhead in the Middle East.
- As Starmer’s UK Labour Party brands Palestine supporters, Jews not excepted, “anti-Semitic”, one prominent Tory is the exception proving the rule that, in what Tariq Ali called “the extreme centre”, the Left-Right distinction is meaningless:
Click on the above screenshot to access the story. As of 12 noon on October 14, no other UK national has reported this..