Israel, the Hermit Kingdom

            “The world is kind of deserting Israel right now,” Representative Tim Burchett, Republican of Tennessee, remarked after meeting with members of the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC. “So they’re worried about that.”

            Their concern is warranted. Less than six months after Hamas attacked on October 7th, killing 1,200 people with brutality that sparked widespread sympathy as well as material support for the Jewish state, polls show that popular opinion in the U.S. and internationally has turned against Israel at unprecedented levels. The UN secretary-general is angry, the International Court of Justice is giving serious consideration to the charge that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, and even President Joe Biden—a self-described Zionist who has repeatedly visited Israel and rushed to send it weapons after October 7th—has warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that continuing his ground offensive into Rafah, the last relatively intact city left in the Strip, would cross his “red line.”

            Israelis and their supporters are confused. Why is Israel rapidly sliding into pariah status now?

            Netanyahu has forgotten that Israel is a U.S. vassal state. They don’t call the shots. We do. Bibi nonetheless has insolently rejected Biden’s ultimatum.

            Israelis’ cluelessness is understandable. They’ve been oppressing the Palestinians for decades. They’ve ignored UN resolutions requiring that they stop occupying Arab territory, they’ve sent nearly a million religious fanatics to colonize the West Bank, and they’ve run the only apartheid state in the world following the end of that system in South Africa—yet nothing bad has ever happened to them. America kept sending them billions of dollars a year, arming them with high-tech weapons and intelligence, and ran interference for them at the UN whenever the world tried to hold them accountable for human rights abuses. Why should the good times come to an end?

            The answer, of course, is two-fold. The systemic decimation of Gaza, caught in high-definition videos on social media in an act of ethnic cleansing obviously intended to be succeeded by annexation, is even more extreme than Israel’s previous crimes. Israel’s war against the innocent civilians of Gaza is the feather that broke the world’s patience and indifference…a one-ton feather.

            That the world would turn away from Israel was easy to see coming tens of thousands of dead Gazans ago.

For everyone but the Israelis, that is.

            Israelis are not stupid people. How did they fail to anticipate that they would soon be shunned and despised for what most of the world sees as a grotesque and opportunistic overreaction to October 7th? As a nation created by the UN, no other country depends as much upon international goodwill for its survival.

            Israel, you’ll notice if you visit, is along with North Korea and the United States one of the most insular countries on earth. Whereas most of the world and its news coverage is omnivorously internationalist, and floods in Myanmar or a coup in Central America makes the top of the news, Israel, like the U.S., obsesses over its own domestic affairs to the exclusion of all else with the exception of events that impact it directly—and it does so from an unabashedly nationalist viewpoint.

            Like the U.S., Israel is a melting pot of immigrants where assimilation is expected to include learning the national language. Unlike us, who have been blessed with seeing our mother tongue spread as the 20th and 21st centuries’ lingua franca, more than 90% of Israelis read and speak one of the most globally useless languages anywhere, an artificially revived form of long-dead Hebrew.  Curious Americans looking for viewpoints outside the MSM echo chamber can access the BBC and the CBC and Al Jazeera English for foreign coverage in the English language. Israelis looking for alternative news and opinions in Hebrew have no options.

            Founded in large part by Holocaust survivors, veterans of numerous wars and beleaguered by countless terrorist attacks, it is completely understandable why Israelis are obsessed with security. But security is a two-edged sword. When you keep other people out, you yourself remain inside. And you are deprived of the insights and different ways of looking at things people get when they interact with others and opinions that differ from their own.

            It’s also not very effective. Israel, a self-declared safe haven for global Jewry, is by far the most dangerous country for Jewish people.

            Consider, for example, the massive “smart” high-tech security walls Israel built to keep out residents of the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. They were remarkably effective (until October 7th) at segregating populations that Israelis have come to view as dangerous, if not as inherent enemies. At the same time, Israelis now have no day-to-day interaction with their Arab neighbors. They don’t do business together, they don’t make friends, they don’t date, they don’t talk, they can’t get each other. Walling off Gaza is such an extreme act that it cuts off Israel from the Mediterranean Sea; no country interested in its internal security or military strategy voluntarily relinquishes access to the sea. Even the Arab Israelis who comprise 20% of Israel’s population have found themselves discriminated against, isolated and alienated within their own country.

            It’s the height of irony. It’s not just the people of Gaza who live in a giant open-air concentration camp. Survivors of Germany’s camps have built their own prison camp—for themselves—and it’s the biggest, most effective one of them all.

            No wonder Israelis can’t relate to the rest of the planet. They’ve been living on the inside so long they don’t see the real world anymore. Colonialism, a distinctly 19th and early 20th century project, is an anachronism. Apartheid too. Israelis don’t see that opposing the war against Gaza isn’t the same as anti-Zionism, which itself isn’t the same as anti-Semitism. They don’t understand that, these days, even if you don’t care about the people you are killing to steal their land, you have to pretend that you do (e.g., Biden’s parachute drops of food supplies into the same place his bombs are killing the starving locals).

            A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that 75% of Jewish Israelis think the country should ignore pressure from the U.S. to wind down the war in Gaza. A poll by Gallup showed that 65% oppose an independent Palestinian state. “It isn’t fashionable to trust Palestinians, any Palestinians,” former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert observes. That’s how white South Africans felt about Blacks during apartheid. Now, of course, they’re fine. So it would/be in a unified post-apartheid Palestine.

            Now the highest-ranking Jewish politician in the U.S., Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, has formally issued a Biden-approved verbal demand for regime change in Israel, saying that Israel should call new elections, which polls indicate Netanyahu might lose.

            Yet Netanyahu persists. “No international pressure will stop Israel,” the prime minister says, pledging to attack Rafah despite Biden’s warning.

            “Isolated, cloistered, militaristic and more unhinged than ever, Israel is becoming the North Korea of the Middle East,” Uri Misgav writes in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Israelis need to tear down their paranoia-grounded security walls—not just to liberate the Palestinians, though that is way overdue!—but to free themselves.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

DMZ America Podcast #123: Passions Flair Over Gaza, Does Dean Phillips’ Presidential Bid Matter? The Weird 14th Amendment Case in Colorado

Passions flair as Editorial Cartoonists Ted Rall (for the Left) and Scott Stantis (for the Right) discuss Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Is Israel practicing self-defense or apartheid? Are the actions of either side even remotely justified? Scott, who supports Israel, and Ted get into it with  verve and more than a little zeal. 
 

Next, they turn to domestic issues to discuss Congressman’s Dean Phillips (D-MN) announcement that he will run for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in the New Hampshire primary and presumably beyond. New Hampshire was a primary President Joe Biden decided to skip. Does Representative Phillips’ campaign matter? (Sidelight: Ted Rall’s short-lived presidential ambitions are dashed by the Congressman’s announcement!) 

Lastly, some folks in Colorado are trying to use an obscure section of the 14th Amendment to keep former President Donald Trump off of the 2024 ballot in Colorado and other states. While neither Ted nor Scott is a MAGA person, they share their strong opinions on this topic. 

Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:

DMZ America Podcast Ep 123 Sec 1: Passions Flair Over Gaza

DMZ America Podcast Ep 123 Sec 2: Does Dean Phillips’ Presidential Bid Matter?

DMZ America Podcast Ep 123 Sec 3: The Weird 14th Amendment Case in Colorado

 

Nelson Mandela’s Unfinished/Unstarted Work

Nelson Mandela is credited for shepherding a peaceful transition from apartheid to a democratic South Africa. But his South Africa and his African National Congress were hardly democratic —€” and he left the essential work of the revolution unfinished. Today, poverty among blacks remains much higher than among whites. The system never really changed.

Many black South Africans are disillusioned by Mandela and his ANC government. Residents of the townships are suffering horribly, yet this “black” “democratic” government hasn’t done much more for them than the old apartheid regime. This was due to two terrible decisions by Mandela in 1994. First, he decided against seeking justice against the apartheid-era criminal whites. Obviously this was the result of pressure from the USA and the West. The ANC called it “reconciliation.” Others called it a sellout. These horrible murderers got away with murder. The lesson to the murderers of the future is, don’t worry, you won’t pay for your crimes.

Second, Mandela and the ANC decided not to implement the communist programme of their socialist and communist allies. Income and wealth redistribution were left on the table. The result is a South Africa that looks the same as before: rich whites, poor blacks. Heckuva job, Nelson.

The lionization of Mandela follows a familiar pattern. Radicals and revolutionaries who betray their former militancy to become accommodationist scoundrels win Nobel Peace Prizes, high office and nice tweets after their die. That’s why former “terrorists” like Mandela, Gerry Adams, Gandhi and Yassir Arafat who stop fighting for their causes and accept establishment sinecures get lionized. Those who hold firm and keep fighting for the people, like Malcolm X, are scorned — compared to the relatively safe/peaceful MLK. The media loves the sellouts, hates the heroes.

I am already being criticized for releasing today’s cartoon about Mandela’s unfinished work because it’s the “wrong time.” That’s what people always say about critical obituary cartoons. But that’s ridiculous. This is exactly the right, appropriate time to weigh Mandela’s life — the good and the bad.

Obituary cartoons have long been a bane of editorial cartooning. A famous person dies and appears at the pearly gates, being welcomed in some incredibly cheesy way to the hereafter. The message, such as it is, “this guy died and it is sad.”

I decided a while ago that obit cartoons could also be an opportunity to provide a corrective to the ocean of praise that follows a Great Man’s death. Reagan, for example, was a turd. Among other things, he intentionally starved AIDS research during the 1980s. So when he died, I showed him in hell.

That’s what today’s cartoon is about: a request that we think outside the box. My cartoon isn’t the full measure of Mandela. Neither are the ones that praise his resistance against apartheid before he sold out to become president. The full assessment will await his biographers. As usual, I’m simply pointing out: “Hey, there’s also some bad stuff here, and we should do something about those.”

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Boycott the 2012 Election

Hey Liberals! Time to Stop Getting Rolled

We might as well have defaulted.

Regardless of where you stand politically, the deal to raise the federal debt limit came too late for the U.S. to achieve its main objective, avoiding the downgrading of debt issued by the U.S. Treasury that would have followed a default.

“The political and financial world surely thinks less of us now, and one demonstration of that will likely be a downgrading of the credit rating of the U.S., probably imposed in the next few months,” writes John Keefe of CBS’s Moneywatch. “The net result will be higher interest rates on U.S. government debt, which is likely to bleed through ultimately to higher costs for all sorts of other interest rates.”

The buzz on Wall Street says that Standard & Poor’s will soon downgrade T-Notes from a sterling “AAA” either to “AA+” or “AA”, the same as Slovakia. That’s exactly what would have happened had there been a default.

It is true: Our leaders are idiots.

“I have a home in Nevada that I haven’t seen in months,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate. “My pomegranate trees are, I’m told, blossoming.” Too bad. He missed his pretty flowers for nothing.

Liberals got rolled.

Just like on healthcare.

Just like on everything else.

Everything about the way this deal went down, from the initial posturing to a compromise that will make the Great Depression of 2008-? even worse, along with Congress’ total lack of concern for the hardships being faced by the 20 percent-plus of Americans who are unemployed, has people disgusted.

“The big loser after this exercise is Washington,” Republican strategist Scott Reed tells The New York Times. The 2012 election “has the potential to be an anti-incumbent feeling in both parties.” Gee, ya think?

If any good comes out of the debt limit fiasco, it’s that this embarrassing showdown could serve as a long overdue wake-up call to liberals who still have faith in the Democratic Party. Maybe, just maybe, these ideological rubes will finally accept the obvious truth:

Those corrupt corporate-backed pigs just aren’t that into us.

So boycott the pigs. It is time for Real Liberals to kick Team Democrats to the curb. It isn’t hard. Next November all you have to do is…

Nothing.

Just.

Don’t.

Vote.

In other countries voter boycotts have a long and proud tradition as a way to effect pressure on a non-responsive political system. Think the politicians won’t care if you don’t vote? History proves you wrong. Even in dictatorships where only one candidate appears on the ballot, regimes go to desperate lengths to get people to turn out to vote. Why? It proves the government’s legitimacy.

Samuel Huntington cites the example of apartheid-era South Africa in his book “The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century”: “In the 1988 municipal elections, the [pro-apartheid] South African government…clamped down on pro-boycott opposition groups and made it unlawful for individuals to urge a boycott.” The African National Congress then upped the ante, declaring its intent to “use revolutionary violence to prevent blacks from collaborating [by casting a vote].”

Extreme, perhaps. Effective, definitely. The ANC is now the majority incumbent party in post-apartheid South Africa.

Are you Real? Or do you play for a Team?

If you’re a Real Liberal, you espouse liberal values and policies that you think would make America a better place. If you’re a partisan of Team Politics, you only care about one thing—whether the Democrats get elected. You couldn’t care less about policy.

Which side are you on?

Like Clinton and Carter before him, Obama has sold out core liberal Democratic principles, such as fighting for the weak and poor and expanding the social safety net, as well as civil liberties. He can’t point to a single major liberal policy achievement. Heck, Obama hasn’t proposed a major liberal bill. Even so, Team Democrats will vote for Obama in 2012. Team Democrats are Democrats first, liberals last.

Real Liberals, on the other hand, have no reason to support the Dems. The debt limit deal makes this painfully clear.

Paul Krugman, the only reason to read The New York Times op/ed page, calls the debt limit deal “a disaster, and not just for President Obama and his party. It will damage an already depressed economy; it will probably make America’s long-run deficit problem worse, not better; and most important, by demonstrating that raw extortion works and carries no political cost, it will take America a long way down the road to banana-republic status.”

Krugman is a Real Liberal. Real Liberals care about liberal policies—defending old liberal victories such as Social Security and Medicare, as well as struggling to achieve new gains like a public-works program to put the unemployed to work.

Real Liberals give Democratic politicians the benefit of the doubt. But after they prove themselves to be a DINO (Democrat In Name Only), Real Liberals withhold their support. Classic example: Joe Lieberman, the senator from Connecticut. Current version: Barack Obama and his allies.

Obama has been locked in an epic showdown with House Republicans for weeks. Matador vs. bull. Scary and exciting.

First and foremost, the debt ceiling debate was ridiculous from the start. The economy is at a standstill. Recent GDP numbers came in at a sub-anemic 1.9 percent, so low that the real unemployment rate of 21 percent will continue to increase. Foreclosures are emptying out whole neighborhoods.

The traditional, historically proven Keynesian response to Depression is for the government to spend more. Members of both major parties know this. Yet here they were, both agreeing to spend less, indeed to slash the budget by historic amounts. If the Democrats had an ounce of sense, much less principle, they would have refused to discuss budget cuts at all. (Although an end to the wars would be nice.)

Obama and Congressional Democrats went along with trillions in cuts, cuts that may lead to Soviet-style collapse. The Dems’ only demand was that a final agreement include tax increases on the wealthy.

In the end, the Hopey Changey matador hopped the fence and fled the stadium. The GOP got their cuts. The Dems didn’t get a cent of taxes on the rich.

OK, Real Liberals. It’s been three years. You know Obama’s record. Obama never fights. When he does, it’s for conservative values, like slashing the federal budget and giving our money to millionaire bankers.

Why would you vote for him, or any Democrat, next year?

I know, I know: the Even More Insane Evil Republicans would take over. Après nous, la deluge. To which I ask, really, truly, no sarcasm—what difference would it make?

What if John McCain had won in 2008? Do you think we’d be at war in more countries than Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and Libya? Would the Republicans have done less than Obama for the unemployed and homeowners getting evicted from their homes?

How much longer are you going to tolerate the sellout Democrats? How many more times are you going to stand in line to cast a vote for these treacherous scum?

(Ted Rall is the author of “The Anti-American Manifesto.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

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