Norway, Spain and Ireland have joined the 140 nations that recognize Palestine as a country, this coming right after the International Criminal Court prepared to issue an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Never has Israel seemed so much like an international pariah state.
We’re the Pariah-iest!
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication and WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a contributor to Centerclip and co-host of "The Final Countdown" talk show on Radio Sputnik. He is a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "2024: Revisited."
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As a Gen Xer, a lot of my thinking on news items emerges from the black box of thought as a scene from a TV show. Here’s Capt. Kirk outwitting the M5 computer.
“And how will you pay for your acts of murder?”
How, indeed. Many other countries/their representatives/individuals are equally guilty of equally obscene acts over the centuries. And one of the worst examples of irony is the phrase above the gates at Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work shall set you free.”) — i.e., you are going to be worked to death.
How will Israel square the books? How will Israel atone for this? Is “Never forget” about to take on a particularly ironic interpretation when the whole world adopts it as a reminder of Israel’s irreparable actions in Gaza?
How many of those other countries “atoned” or “squared the books”? I think that’s mostly a modern Western ideological preoccupation, most visible in Germany. And the way they atoned in Germany is by backing Israel to a hilt in the Palestinian question.
….and who is the #1 supporter of “the pariah-es”? “USA! USA! USA!” And what is that doing to what’s left of our country’s “international reputation”?
“We don’t care what you think, cuz we’ve got the world’s biggest army” is clearly the wrong response.
There are consequences already, and there will be more.
The US military didn’t do so well fighting the Vietnamese or the Afghans. But the Russians won’t be a problem. The “1812 Overture” by a French composer celebrated Napoleon’s victory over Russia, and Germans remember how the Wehrmacht easily defeated the Red Army. Just because Russia have the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, but don’t worry, they must have lost the codes when the USSR collapsed.
> Many other countries / their representatives / individuals are equally guilty of equally obscene acts over the centuries.
That’s a fact. And many of these obscene acts are carried out in the name of countering obscene acts by others. Until humanity learns that eradication or punishment of the enemy is now less likely to be effective than a reasonable peace treaty, this continues ad absurdum. A peace treaty is the more effective approach so long as it does not compromise when it comes to giving freedom and security to all parties.
While I don’t disagree with most of this, “humanity” will learn nothing and really needs to learn nothing. This stuff is already well-known from centuries of experience, it’s just that the people in power and their supporters choose to forget it. I’d add that there is a powerful strain of national self-righteousness that dominated the Western world since maybe the 19th century, or perhaps a little earlier. It is making itself known again. Bad as wars could get before then, and bad as they themselves could be, old European rulers were not so allergic to peace treaties on terms other than the unconditional surrender of the other side. That is a disease.