Gaslit in Amsterdam/Trump foreign policy

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Britain’s Telegraph newspaper, November 8, 2024

Gaslighting for Israel continues apace, regardless of the hit to corporate media credibility, but as Newton helpfully pointed out, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”.  Coverage of Thursday’s events in Amsterdam triggered many good critiques. Owen Jones’s for instance, for all his blind spots on other matters. For more detail, if you’ve sixty-three minutes, check out Kevork Almassian at Syriana Analysis. Novara Media have been OK too – though I marvel at Michael Walker keeping a straight face as he tells us that “even (!) the Guardian cast Israeli fans as victims” – but my vote goes to Jonathan Cook today. The former Guardian journalist who quit over its pro-Israel bias begins:

The West buries a genocide – by making victims of Israel’s football thugs

If the West was really worried about Europe’s Nazi past, it would be better advised to stop stoking an all-too-real new antisemitism: incitement against Arab and Muslim minorities

There has never been a harder time to do political and media analysis than right now. Each day, the western establishment unmoors itself further from reality. Its priorities are so inverted, so obscene, that the most appropriate response is ridicule.

The latest example was the reaction late last week to violent clashes in Amsterdam before and after a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and the local team Ajax.

The ridiculous framing from western politicians, assisted by mainstream media outlets, was that the visiting Israelis were “hunted down” in what supposedly amounted to a “pogrom” by Dutch street gangs, comprising mainly youths of Arab and Muslim heritage.

According to this official narrative, the violence on Amsterdam’s streets was further proof of a rising tide of antisemitism sweeping Europe and imported from the Middle East. More, the attacks were presented as having disturbing echoes of Europe’s Nazi past.

Joe Biden claimed the Israeli fans faced “despicable” attacks that “echo dark moments in history when Jews were persecuted”.

Israel, of course, helpfully stoked this idea by promising “emergency flights” to “rescue” its football fans – seeking to evoke memories of its airlifts in the 1980s of Ethiopian Jews to escape famine and reports of persecution, or possibly of the 1975 airlift of US embassy staff from Saigon …

Read full piece …

Moving on. Caitlin Johnstone’s post today – The Incoming Trump Administration Is Already Filling Up With War Sluts – is hard to quarrel with. For a taster of the likely team, ultra Zionist Elise Stefanik – she who bragged of taking the scalps of Ivy League and other university CEOs insufficiently zealous in suppressing campus protests against genocide in Gaza – is to be his UN Ambassador.

Then there’s one-time presidential contender Marc Rubio, tipped for Secretary of State when the equally lamentable Anthony Blinken vacates in January. It’s fair to say that, like his former rival and boss to be, Mr Rubio is not a deep thinker.

The AIPAC funded Rubio’s description of “Iran’s brutal attack on Israeli civilians” – for which he offers not an iota of evidence – has to be set against this from Wiki:

One Israeli civilian died as a result of a heart attack caused by stress and anxiety triggered by the attacks and two Israeli civilians were reported to be injured lightly by the strikes. Several Palestinians in Jericho were injured by rocket fragments. A 37-year-old Palestinian man identified as Sameh al-Asali, a laborer originally from Gaza, was killed in Jericho by a shrapnel from an intercepted missile in an incident captured on CCTV.

My own characterisation of the Iranian strike of October 1st has been posted several times but here’s one more for good luck:

In its capacity to slice through Iron Dome and David’s Sling, Tehran has telegraphed in sterner terms than those of April that Zionist impunity is over. No Western asset in the Middle East is untouchable. Be it an RAF base in Cyprus supplying intel for the IDF, a US warship in the eastern Med, the oil fields of Arab autocracies, ships in the Hormuz choke point or, indeed, the apartheid state itself – all are vulnerable …

I mention this because, also tipped for a top job is Mike Waltz to replace the equally Zionist but outgoing Jake Sullivan as National Security Advisor. ¹ Says Caitlin:

Like [John] Bolton, Waltz is a warmongering freak. Journalist Michael Tracey has been filling up his Twitter page since the announcement with examples of Waltz’s insane hawkishness, including his support for letting Ukraine use US weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, criticizing Biden for not escalating aggressively enough in Ukraine, advocating bombing Iran, opposing the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, and naming Iran, North Korea, China, Russia and Venezuela as “on the march” against the United States toward global conflict. The mainstream press are calling Waltz a “China hawk”, but from the look of things he’s a war-horny hawk toward all the official enemies of the United States.

Again no quarrel from me but let me add in Mike’s feeble grasp of realpolitik. Here he is on Fox News, six weeks before October 1st.

Lets set aside the reality-inverting assertion – as if his country, slavishly aided by mine, had not left a trail of carnage and chaos in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria – that Iran “again has the middle east in flames”.  Let’s just look to his razor-sharp zionsplaining – I repeat, before October 1 showed Iron Dome and David’s Sling to have no answer to Iran’s missile superiority – as to why Tehran had not retaliated to Israel’s serial provocations. ² Why not? Because, Waltz informs Fox News viewers not much given to subjecting the idiotic prophecies of warmongers to subsequent scrutiny, Iran dreads a terrible response from Mighty Israel.

Two three questions. One, haven’t we been here before in respect of Russia’s surefire defeat in the Ukraine? Two, is Waltz also AIPAC funded? Three, need we ask? ³

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. When liberals wake up – and most never do – to the truth that we do not live under a democracy in any meaningful sense of the term, but are ruled by an oligarchy, they frequently embrace the opposite error: that those who rule, or those who do the bidding of those who rule, are fiendishly clever.

The domestic economy, not foreign affairs, decides US elections but this is on the nail re the entitled stupidity of the DNC

So what are the grown ups saying? Over to the always soberly impressive former UK diplomat, Alastair Crooke, as the judge asks him whether Trump has such a thing as a foreign policy …

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1. Just as the Rubio pick might be seen as a slap down of Mike Pompeo, that of Mike Waltz might be termed a nail in the coffin of any aspirations John Bolton may once have held for a return to the fold. But given the Stefanik, Rubio and Waltz picks, and Vance as vice president – given too Trump’s remarks on “bad disloyal people”  – it’s safe to say that Bolton, Pompeo and a few others like Nikki Haley are off limits on personal rather than political grounds.
2. Israel’s “serial provocations” have all been calculated to force an Iranian response which would drag the US into a war Israel could not otherwise hope to win – nor its besieged leader to stay in office and out of jail. Not that even US direct engagement would ensure Iran’s defeat, though Waltz and Rubio are either unaware of this or really aren’t troubled by the truth that, for reasons I laid out in US Neocons and Israel’s far Right: Part 4, the logical end of their road of choice is WW3.
3. My noting the many US politicians, of blue stripe or red, funded by AIPAC or similar is not an endorsement of the view that Israel rules the USA. I went into this in US Neocons and Israel’s far Right: Part 3.