Not rockets, Michael – missiles

Yesterday Nova Media ran a short feature on the denunciation by Britain’s prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, of Iran’s missile strike on Israel. Michael Walker reminds us that Starmer …

… remained relatively mute as Israel killed 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza and had little to say about Israel invading its neighbour Lebanon. But when it came to Iran firing rockets at Israel, rockets that appear to have killed no Israelis, he was positively furious:

Good evening. The Iranian regime has launched 200 ballistic missiles at civilian targets in Israel. It is too soon to assess the impact fully but I utterly condemn this attempt by the Iranian regime to harm innocent Israelis, to escalate this incredibly dangerous situation and push the region ever closer to the brink.

I’m not a huge fan of Novara Media or Michael Walker. Like Owen Jones, Michael’s elevation of Woke politics over class makes him a useful idiot for empire – the more so for both being stars of the Left – on such crunch issues as Syria, Julian Assange and the war on Russia in Ukraine.

More specifically here, Michael’s double reference to “rockets”, while not calculatedly offensive the way Starmer’s double reference to “regime” is, betrays weak understanding. Iran did not fire rockets. It fired supersonic and hypersonic (several times Mach 1) missiles. In a game-changing display of its capacity to slice through Iron Dome and David’s Sling, Tehran has telegraphed – in sterner terms than those of Operation True Promise in April – to the terrorist state and its Western partners in genocide that the era of Zionist impunity is over. ¹ No Western asset in the Middle East is untouchable. Be it an RAF base in Cyprus supplying intel for IDF murder from the air, a US warship in the eastern Med, the oil fields of the Arab autocracies, the ships through the Hormuz choke point or, indeed, the apartheid state itself – all are vulnerable …

… should the stakes continue to rise. Which they absolutely will for as long as Jerusalem has the unconditional support of the West. For all the rabbit-in-the-headlights look he specialises in, Sir Keir Starmer’s job, like that of his fellow narrative managers across the said West, is to reaffirm at every opportunity that unconditional support.

Red meat to a mad dog.

Tehran, unlike Netanyahu’s unhinged cabinet, does not seek a region-wide war which could go global. This truth has thus far begotten a restraint misread in Jerusalem and Washington as fear thinly concealed by bluster, much as Moscow’s restraint in the face of NATO provocations had been misread. Even now Tehran pulls its punches. Starmer’s references – ridiculous, as Michael Walker rightly says – to an “attempt by the Iranian regime to harm innocent Israelis”  are a mile wide of the mark. While IDF strikes in Lebanon alone – let alone twelve months of mass murder in Gaza ² – dropped 2,000 pound ‘bunker-buster’ bombs made in the USA on a high rise block in Beirut to kill one man plus scores of men, women and infant collaterals, Iran has shown what it could  have done but chose not to.

This is a blow to Israel as psychological as it is strategic. Its far right regime, loathed but – with pegs on noses – supported by the rogue state’s Ashkenazi and egged on by its Mizrahi, has a tacit contract with the former. Even as  liberal and secular Ashkenazi sneer at the Bibis and Ben Gvrs, the Smotrichs and “Little Snakes” Shakeds, they look to them for protection.

On the evening of October 1, 2024, Israel and the world saw the limits to that protection. Israeli hasbara  and news blackout can obscure but not negate this transformed reality. No more can Starmer’s Goebbelsian nonsense or our systemically corrupt corporate media.

Now what? Having spent a good many hours since the Iranian strike devouring and seeking to triangulate sources, I can honestly say that while I’ve sketched out a few knowns, probables and possibles, anyone who says they are sure what happens next is even more surely deluded.

One last point. Much has been written by Caitlin Johnstone, Jonathan Cook and others on the Orwellian language deployed by narrative managers, in government as in corporate media, charged with defending the indefensible. It falls to these junior stewards of empire to further its designs by mendacity, self-serving delusion or a mix of the two.  As a colossally propagandised West takes in – courtesy of social media – history’s first electronically disseminated genocide, gaslighting on an epic scale must be brought to bear. How could language not  be weaponised the way Starmer, in that dull manner of the deeply mediocre, does with the “regime” epithet?

War is peace. Lies are truth. Aggressor is victim. But has Iran’s strike of October 1 done us all a favour? Has it offered a faint ray of hope, albeit in terms that would have Eric Blair (no relation to the Butcher of Iraq) turning in his grave? Is the Axis of Resistance on the verge of concluding that it may have to escalate to de-escalate?

That’s a question for my next post …

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1. While the powerful Israel Lobby has captured the West’s “democracies” and alternatively threatened and greased the palms of most of its senior politicians, Starmer has a more specific cause for gratitude. It played an indispensable role in ousting his predecessor to allow Sir Keir to reclaim the Labour Party for Britain’s ruling class.
2. As the highly esteemed medical journal, The Lancet, has shown, Michael’s 40,000 figure understates, likely by a factor of five or more, the true fatality figures for Gaza.