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Victimhood or Vengeance? Israel Wants, But Cannot Have, Both

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Ted Rall

Victimhood or vengeance: choose one.

You can’t have both.

Israel is about to learn that. Supporters of Israel’s government (as opposed to Israel writ large, which includes millions of Israelis who distrust their government) ask: Why are so few people still talking about October 7th? “It is striking and in some ways shocking that the brutality of the slaughter has receded so quickly in the memories of so many,” U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken remarked in early November.

Hamas’ attack was vicious, claimed many victims and was so recent—how can it be that those pitiful “kidnapped” posters are falling so flat so soon?

Blame Netanyahu and his co-conspirators.

They chose vengeance over victimhood.

They had a choice. Instead of gleefully indulging themselves in an unseemly orgy of destruction and murder after Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis and took 240 as hostages, Israel’s far-right government might instead have embraced the role of victim: Weep. Express confusion. Witness the personal stories of the dead and the lost. Beg Hamas to return the people it had kidnapped.

No bombs, no invasion, no psychotic rants about “human animals” or officially-tolerated banners genocidally screaming “Zero Gazans” hanging from a bridge in Tel Aviv.

Turn the other cheek.

Precise violence would have been acceptable. A raid against Hamas’ leadership, say. A hostage rescue attempt.

Had Israel not attacked Gaza in a wholesale campaign so devastating that historians have already declared it one of the most destructive in the history of warfare, it would continue to enjoy the sympathy and support of a world which, before the IDF saturation bombing campaign began on October 8th, had abandoned the Palestinians and forgotten the brutality they’d endured at the hands of the Zionists. U.N. resolutions would currently be directed against Hamas, not Israel. The Palestinian liberation movement, theretofore dormant and close to dead, would be a non-entity. America would be as festooned with Israeli flags as it was with Ukrainian ones a year ago.

Victimhood comes with downsides. Like, you can’t ethnically cleanse a couple of million Palestinians you’ve always hated and whose land you’ve long coveted. You look weak.

Look, I get it. War is fun. It keeps you in office even/especially when you’re facing prison time for corruption. Not to mention 141 square miles of beachfront real estate—that’s a land grab far too tasty to pass up.

But vengeance too, Israel is learning, is not without its own costs.

Israel has the right and the duty to defend itself, but this is not that. We’re hearing this linguistic construction a lot, notably from careful politicians and pundits whom, pre-war, would have omitted the qualifier phrase. Even allowing for the president’s imprecise command of English, Joe Biden’s complaint about Israel’s “indiscriminate bombing” (using mostly American bombs) was remarkable.

Israel has used 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs to kill 20,000 Gazans and make 2 million homeless by transforming their territory into a wasteland, all while penning them inside a death zone subject to typhoid, cholera and mass famine because Israel refuses to permit food trucks to enter the territory which they have occupied and subjugated for decades. If October 7th was a horror, what Israel has wrought since is that horror hundreds of times over. There must easily be least 100,000 Palestinian bodies buried beneath countless piles of rubble.

We didn’t forget October 7th. Israel eclipsed the Hamas attack, erased it, sacrificed its survivor-hostages to its war so thoroughly that it intentionally shot three of them when they managed to escape. We’re following Israel’s lead.

The U.S. made a similar call after 9/11. I wouldn’t call it a mistake as much as a conscious decision. For the most part, with the exception of the mawkish “never forget” yellow-ribboned grief porn still adorning some police stations and oversized pickup trucks driven by a certain type of right-winger, Americans accepted the erasure of their 3,000 dead in exchange for the mindless purposefulness of Bush’s Global War On Terror, deployed in the post-Cold War period to justify everything from invading Afghanistan to arming Yemen against the Houthis.

Unlike our whiny Israeli allies, we Americans know better than to ask why the world forgot 9/11. We forgot 9/11. We made our choice and we kill with it. “We are all Americans,” Le Monde editorialized the day after; we replied thanks but no thanks, we’ll kill anywhere and everywhere and Freedom Fry you wimps. That much grace and class, we have: we own our thug life and we’re totally good with the fact that the world hates us more than ever.

Meanwhile, that giant ripping sound is Israel’s blank check being torn up.

The whining is what happens when you keep doing the same thing while the world is changing all around you and then complain about it.

Since 1948 Israel has had Big Bad Sam across the ocean to fund and arm them while running interference for them at the U.N., no matter how much Palestinian land they stole or how many Palestinians they killed. After October 7th they assumed they could keep doing whatever they wanted. Biden confirmed their assumption.

Nice run. It’s done now.

Israel no longer controls the narrative. It no longer matters that Al Jazeera is censored by American cable companies because its Gaza footage is now available on social media.  Israel is no longer admired as a safe haven for Holocaust survivors because they are almost all dead and gone; for Millennials and Zoomers Israel is just another country, albeit an anachronistic, uncomfortable vestige of the settler-colonial era with a major stank of apartheid. Israel’s star is sinking.

Sympathy for the vengeful peaked out in the “Dirty Harry”-“Death Wish” 1970s, when violent retribution was expected, accepted and even admired following an unprovoked wrong. Lashing back is now as passé as old white men on a college campus.

Israel is a young country and like a teenager it wants to have things both ways, both to be loved and feared. Now that it has destroyed Gaza, love is off the table. If it is lucky, it will retain a few of its former allies as tolerant frenemies.

If you want to be admired now, you need to get yourself some victimhood status. Consider affirmative action, the politics of transgenderism and income tests for government benefits unrelated to poverty—societal benefits accrue to those perceived to have been oppressed, repressed, tortured, traumatized and brutalized by those with power, wealth and strength—the very definition of nuclear-power Israel’s status in the Middle East. After Palestinians exchanged their retributive PLO of the 1970s for an impotent PA under occupation, the global Left began to embrace their cause. October 7th, a shocking throwback to Munich and the Achille Lauro, might have shifted victimhood back to the Jewish state, at least for a time, had Netanyahu’s gang not rejected self-restraint in favor of ultraviolence and opportunism.

Israel, a nation whose architecture, general aesthetics and fashion is stuck in the 1970s, is paying the price for its failure to grasp 21st century reality:

It’s better to have people feel sorry for you than to be afraid of you.

(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.)

There’s Your Toxic Masculinity Talking

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Ted Rall

Masculinity has been so maligned in public discussion that even the term “toxic masculinity,” which originally referred to something that men were victims of, has become a redundant statement about how masculinity itself is toxic.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Society Makes Victimhood a No-Win Proposition

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Ted Rall

https://www.flotechinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/freshclam.jpg            From Clarence Thomas to Jerry Sandusky to Bill Cosby to Harvey Weinstein, those who doubt their accusers always ask something similar to what Roy Moore said about those who accused him of sexual harassment and assault: “To think grown women would wait 40 years before a general election to bring charges is unbelievable.”

What takes so long? Why don’t alleged victims head straight to the police?

There are 17 good reasons in this great article.

Let me add two more that we don’t talk about enough: shame and fear of disbelief.

I’m not referring to the well-documented victims’ fear that they somehow brought the attack on themselves (for example, a woman who worries that she somehow sent mixed signals to a suitor who then raped her), but to something one rarely sees discussed in the media or talked about in typical conversations about victimhood.

Society doesn’t like victims. Victims make us uncomfortable. It’s probably a vestige of our Darwinian instinct for survival: the monkey clan prospers when its members are healthy and lucky, but finds life perilous around those who are sick and unfortunate. We turn away from the unlucky: the homeless man, the woman whose face bears burn scars, the black guy getting choked to death by cops. Not our business, not our problem, these are troubles to be avoided. I do it too.

This instinct goes double for those who refuse to soft-pedal their victimhood. Not even the most active social justice warriors have Rose McGowan’s back in her Twitter crusade against Harvey Weinstein — she’s a bit too angry for comfort. (Her recent drug arrest doesn’t help.)

I am not judging humanity here. I am trying to answer Roy Moore et al’s question. One of the answers is shame — the shame simply of being a victim in a shallow capitalist society that loves winners, hates losers and despises victims. Fake it to make it has a corollary: never let ’em see you sweat.

My friend Cole Smithey the critic told me a bit of film theory, after a character in a movie gets maimed (loses a hand, gets shot and acts shot, getting weaker and visibly bleeding, whatever), the audience stops liking and identifying with him or her. There are exceptions. Typically, however, a screenwriter will have a maimed character die, vanish or completely recover. Because no one likes a victim.

Getting fired and libeled by the LA Times reminded me of that anthropological truism. Immediately following my firing, I hardly heard from my fellow cartoonists. (That’s rare.) Friends resurfaced after I presented exculpatory evidence. A pair of taints (Loser and Liar) had been erased.

Then I sued the Times for defamation, and things tipped back. Some of my friends stayed true but others dumped me because they were scared that if they sided with me the Times and Tronc might deny them work, also because I’d gone Rose McGowan-y crusade-y. It’s true that the LAPD bought Tronc and the Times fired me for the LAPD, but it’s weird and anyway, no one likes a victim. Especially not an angry one.

Fear of not being believed is another underdiscussed yet potent inhibitor to victims considering whether to step forward, whether by filing a police report or going to the press.

I grew up poor with my single mom and we were short of money. To bring in some cash, my mom hooked me up with a job helping the janitor wash the blackboards after school at my junior high school. Looking back now, it was a situation perfect for an abuser: no one but an older male custodian and a 13-year-old boy in the otherwise empty building.

One afternoon the dude snuck behind me while I was working in a classroom and grabbed me, pinning my arms to my side. “Do you trust me?” he whispered in my ear. I remember his exact voice, the smell of his breath (alcohol, bourbon maybe). I felt his penis harden against my back.

I did not trust him.

But I told him I did, several times, and he believed me and let me go and I bounded exactly three steps toward the door, turned the knob and launched myself down the hall and flung myself down the stairs and hurled out the emergency exit, and I ran and ran and ran and it was so damn beautiful outside and I could hear the fire alarm ringing.

When my mom came home, I lied. I told her the job was over, the custodian no longer needed me.

Later a kid I didn’t know approached me at school. He might have been a year older. He asked me if I had worked for the dirty old janitor and whether he’d gone after me because the same thing had happened to him. I didn’t ask if he’d gone to the principal or told his parents and he didn’t ask me. It would have been the stupidest question in the world because no one would have believed us.

No one ever believed kids back then. About anything. The school administration wouldn’t have believed us about the English teacher who kept pot in his desk or the algebra teacher who seduced my friend or the driver’s ed instructor who grabbed my classmate’s breasts right in front of me and my best friend.

            We Gen X kids understood the world as it was: survival was up to us. Adults didn’t care; adults wouldn’t help. Decades later, when I told my mom that story, she admitted I was right. “I assumed you were lazy,” she said about my quitting the job.

If you’ve never been a victim of some kind, you may find this strange, but there is something worse than knowing (or suspecting) that you may not be believed, and that is coming forward and letting cops and courts and human resource officers decide for themselves, based on the evidence and their biases, whether they believe you or not.

As long as you keep your victimhood to yourself, you know your experience was real.

(Ted Rall’s (Twitter: @tedrall) next book is “Francis: The People’s Pope,” the latest in his series of graphic novel-format biographies. Publication date is March 13, 2018. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Being, Nothingness and Anthony Weiner

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Ted Rall

Should Anthony Weiner Resign?

Should Anthony Weiner resign?

Aside from the obvious pleasure that we derive from wallowing in salacious revelations about the rich and powerful, this week’s Weiner sexting controversy provides a window into American morals. Namely: what is wrong, what is right, and what if anything should be done about it?

Let’s look at the sin first.

Weiner sent smutty photos, some with smutty captions, to some of his followers on Twitter. As far as we know he never met any of these women in person, much less had sex with them.

After the Congressman and once-possible-future mayor of the City of New York realized that he had mistakenly sent one of his crotch shots to the wrong addressee, he got too clever by half. Trying to get ahead of the story before it broke organically, he called a press conference and claimed that Evil Right Wingers had hacked his Twitter account. This lame story quickly fell apart, and here we are, with The New York Times editorial board officially decrying Weiner’s “profoundly squalid and offensive pattern of conduct,” language one would have liked to have seen used to describe, for example, torture. Or the bailouts for millionaire bank executives. Or lying us into war in Afghanistan. And Iraq. And Libya.

No victim, no sin. Who’s Weiner’s victim?

Not, apparently, the women to whom he tweeted his…tweet. As far as we know, they were willing adult participants.

Weiner’s wife Huma Abedin is the sole candidate for Victim.

You have the right to feel outraged on her behalf. Me, I’m wary. No one but a husband and wife (or two husbands or wives) knows what goes on between them.

For all we know, Huma might be evil. She may have done far worse. Maybe she doesn’t mind. Or thinks a guy is entitled to fantasies that don’t involve his wife. If she sticks around we’ll at least know that her hubby’s “profoundly squalid and offensive pattern of conduct” wasn’t worth divorce.

The way I see it, this is the Weiners’ business.

To ask whether Weiner should resign, then, goes to another question. Did he betray his constituents–those in Queens and, more broadly as a nationally-known Congressman, the American people?

No doubt, Weiner lied to we, the people. It’s hard to imagine now, but that used to be an impeachable offense. Dig up Richard Nixon and ask him.

Nowadays, however, the public seems to have abandoned the expectation that politicians tell the truth. President Obama, for example, included a clear call for a public option in his healthcare reform proposal during the 2008 presidential campaign. It’s still on his website. And yet: “I didn’t campaign on the public option,” he said in late 2009.

Weiner lied. But it wasn’t about policy or something important like war. Remember Libya? We were going to “move quickly to save [civilian] lives.” It was going to be “this limited action, limited both in time and scope.” That was March. Now we’re trying to kill Kadaffi.

And, to Weiner’s credit, he didn’t lie long. A week. When he ‘fessed up, he did it like a man: took questions from the press, accepted responsibility, volunteered dirty deeds we didn’t know about.

It’s certainly not “we DID find the WMDs,” à la Bush-Cheney. Who, remember, did not resign.

I would love to live in a country in which lying to the public was cause for resignation. It sure would make for a lot of vacancies in government.

But we don’t–and it seems weird to hold a sexter to a higher standard than a warmongering mass murderer.

Ultimately the public’s case against Weiner comes down to the one Edward G. Robinson snaps at the dastardly insurance salesman played by Fred MacMurray in “Double Indemnity”: “I picked you for the job, not because I think you’re so darn smart, but because I thought maybe you were a shade less dumb than the rest of the outfit. I guess I was all wet. You’re not smarter, Walter. You’re just a little taller.”

Weiner doesn’t even get to be tall.

The Times questioned Weiner’s “judgment and character, considering that he was once considered one of the savvier members of the House. Had it not occurred to him, in an era of unending sexual scandal, that repeatedly sending these kinds of photographs to strangers would eventually catch up with him? And that, if it did, his attempt to exploit his political celebrity for online sexual gratification would be considered reprehensible?”

Should Weiner resign? Only if not being sufficiently cold, cynical and calculating is just cause.

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

COPYRIGHT 2011 TED RALL

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