The Jewish Roots of the Gaza Rampage •
The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank
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What is driving Israel’s war on Gaza? (Land, Hamas, ideology or something else?)
Ron Unz—I think that a complex mixture of all those different factors is responsible, each being uppermost for different individuals. But obviously the triggering event was the extremely successful Hamas raid on October 7th and the total shock and horror it inflicted upon a very complacent Israeli society. As I wrote in December:
For years, many thousands of Palestinians had been held without trial as prisoners in Israel, often under brutal conditions, and these captives included large numbers of women and children. So Hamas hoped to seize some Israelis who could be traded for their freedom, and they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, carrying around 240 prisoners back to Gaza. In later interviews with Israeli and foreign media outlets, the released or rescued Jewish hostages described how well and respectfully they had been treated by their Hamas captors.
This stunning military achievement was a direct consequence of the arrogance and over-confidence of the Israelis, who had assumed that the many hundreds of millions of dollars they had invested in their Gaza border defenses, featuring banks of high-tech electronic sensors and remotely-operated machine-guns, made them impervious to any attack from Hamas. But the latter used inexpensive small drones and other innovative tactics to disable those defenses, then breached the barrier at numerous points. This allowed 1,500 lightly-armed Hamas militants to cross over and overrun a number of army bases, military kibbutzim, and police stations, some of them deep inside Israeli territory. The IDF was literally caught napping, with many of their sentries asleep or away from their posts, and Hamas achieved an initial success far greater than their expectations.
The Israeli response to this devastating, totally unexpected military attack was panic-stricken, disorganized, and very trigger-happy, with Apache helicopter pilots unable to distinguish friend from foe on the road and merely blasting anything that moved. Video footage shows that hundreds of Israeli cars were incinerated by Hellfire missiles, with some of those vehicles driven by Hamas militants with or without Israeli hostages and others driven by fleeing Israeli civilians.
Since the mid-1980s, Israel has adopted a controversial military policy known as the Hannibal Directive, under which any Israelis captured by Palestinian militants who cannot be readily rescued must be killed to prevent them from becoming hostages, and an Israeli official described what happened on October 7th as “a mass Hannibal.” High explosive tank-shells and missiles were used to blast buildings occupied by Hamas fighters and their Israeli captives, killing everyone.
Based upon the existing evidence, I think that perhaps as few as 100-200 unarmed Israeli civilians may have been killed by the Hamas fighters, in many cases inadvertently, while all the rest died at the hands of Israel’s own trigger-happy military. But admitting such embarrassing facts would have dealt a tremendous blow to the Israeli government, so instead propaganda efforts were put into overdrive, promoting the most ridiculous lies and atrocity-hoaxes involving beheaded babies, babies baked in ovens, and widespread Hamas gang-rapes and sexual mutilations, none of which seem to have any basis in reality.
Not only did this wave of dishonest propaganda help to conceal Israel’s military humiliation, but it also stoked enormous popular anger, producing almost universal support for the brutal retaliatory massacre of tens of thousands of Gaza’s helpless civilians that soon followed. According to Max Blumenthal, polls have shown that up to 98% of Israelis support the massive ongoing attacks on Gaza, with nearly half believing that Israel’s military response has actually been too restrained.
This strategy also dovetailed perfectly with the longstanding goals of the most extreme members of Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet, who for religious reasons have always demanded the expulsion of all Palestinians and the creation of a Greater Israel stretching “from the River to the Sea,” populated solely by Jews. The survival of Netanyahu’s government depended entirely upon that small political faction, and he believed that their support would be solidified if his military operation succeeded in killing or driving out all the Palestinians.
Such an outcome would also establish him as a towering figure in Israel’s national history, the leader who finally achieved the permanent territorial expansion that many of his predecessors had long desired. Meanwhile, every week of continued fighting delayed any public investigation of his disastrous failure on October 7th, which he hoped might eventually be redeemed by a sweeping military victory and territorial conquest.
Does racism play a role in the way the Palestinians are being treated?
Ron Unz—As I discussed in a long 2018 article, the word “racism” is far too mild a term to describe the attitude of traditional Orthodox Judaism towards all non-Jews. Drawing upon the seminal work of Israeli Prof. Israel Shahak, I highlighted some important facts:
If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyim frequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.
Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.
As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.
Shahak also emphasizes the utterly totalitarian nature of traditional Jewish society, in which rabbis held the power of life and death over their congregants, and often sought to punish ideological deviation or heresy using those means. They were outraged that this became difficult as states grew stronger and increasingly prohibited such private executions. Liberalizing rabbis were sometimes murdered and Baruch Spinoza, the famous Jewish philosopher of the Age of Reason, only survived because the Dutch authorities refused to allow his fellow Jews to kill him.
Given the complexity and exceptionally controversial nature of this subject matter, I would urge readers who find this topic of interest to spend three or four hours reading Shahak’s very short book, and then decide for themselves whether his claims seem plausible and whether I may have inadvertently misunderstood them. Aside from the copies on Amazon, the work may also be found at Archive.org and a very convenient HTML copy is also freely available on the Internet.
My encounter a decade ago with Shahak’s candid description of the true doctrines of traditional Judaism was certainly one of the most world-altering revelations of my entire life. But as I gradually digested the full implications, all sorts of puzzles and disconnected facts suddenly became much more clear. There were also some remarkable ironies, and not long afterward I joked to a (Jewish) friend of mine that I’d suddenly discovered that Nazism could best be described as “Judaism for Wimps” or perhaps Judaism as practiced by Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
There may actually be a deeper historical truth behind that irony. I think I’ve read here and there that some scholars believe that Hitler may have modeled certain aspects of his racially-focused National Socialist doctrine upon the Jewish example, which really makes perfect sense. After all, he saw that despite their small numbers Jews had gained enormous power in the Soviet Union, Weimar Germany, and numerous other countries throughout Europe, partly due to their extremely strong ethnic cohesion, and he probably reasoned that his own Germanic people, being far greater in numbers and historical achievements could do even better if they adopted similar practices.
It’s also interesting to note that quite a number of the leading racialist pioneers of 19th century Europe came from a particular ethnic background. For example, my history books had always disapprovingly mentioned Germany’s Max Nordau and Italy’s Cesare Lombroso as two of the founding figures of European racism and eugenics theories, but it was only very recently that I discovered that Nordau had also been the joint founder with Theodor Herzl of the world Zionist movement, while his major racialist treatise Degeneration, was dedicated to Lombroso, his Jewish mentor.
Obviously the Talmud is hardly regular reading among ordinary Jews these days, and I would suspect that except for the strongly Orthodox and perhaps most rabbis, barely a sliver are aware of its highly controversial teachings. But it is important to keep in mind that until just a few generations ago, almost all European Jews were deeply Orthodox, and even today I would guess that the overwhelming majority of Jewish adults had Orthodox grand-parents. Highly distinctive cultural patterns and social attitudes can easily seep into a considerably wider population, especially one that remains ignorant of the origin of those sentiments, a condition enhancing their unrecognized influence. A religion based upon the principle of “Love Thy Neighbor” may or may not be workable in practice, but a religion based upon “Hate Thy Neighbor” might have long-term cultural ripple effects that extend far beyond the direct community of the deeply pious. If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.
For two thousand years, Jews have mostly existed as small minorities within much larger non-Jewish host societies, ensuring that these traditional Jewish doctrines could only manifest themselves in the most secretive or attenuated fashion. But the situation is quite different in Gaza, so the horrors we are seeing there probably provide a much more accurate indication of the attitude of traditional Judaism toward the lives and well-being of non-Jews.
Do you see any strategic reason why Israeli tanks would fire on hungry Palestinians gathered at aid trucks to get food for their families or was this just an act of sadistic violence intended to intimidate the victims?
Ron Unz—Just as in the case of Israel’s overall Gaza military operation, there may be several different factors behind the Israeli massacre of those starving, desperate Palestinians during a food distribution effort.
First, these days the Israeli military and its command structure are increasingly filled with strongly religious Jews, and I’ve emphasized that the doctrines of traditional Judaism regard non-Jewish lives as having no value whatsoever, with non-Jews merely being animals in the shape of men. Indeed, a prominent Israeli rabbi once publicly declared that “A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.” Therefore, massacring Palestinians in large numbers is not really a matter of any significance.
Under such an ideological framework, if a sizable crowd of unarmed Palestinians approaches Israeli military forces too closely and makes the latter a little nervous, the most appropriate response is to drive them away with explosive tank shells and machine-gun fire, perhaps killing many of them in the process.
Obviously, the Israelis are also still outraged over the successful October 7th Hamas raid, an operation that had killed more Israeli soldiers than had died in the previous fifty years of warfare, so slaughtering a few additional Palestinians helps to further balance the books. In addition, the terror inflicted may make Palestinians much more cautious about seeking any food supplies in the future, thereby increasing the effectiveness of Israel’s starvation blockade directed against the population of Gaza.
I think a reasonable historical analogy might be found in the huge slave revolt that plagued Rome during the first century BC. Large forces of slaves led by a former gladiator named Spartacus proved surprisingly effective against the Roman military units sent against them, and they spent several years successfully burning senatorial villas and pillaging the Italian countryside until they were finally defeated and put down. The outraged Romans retaliated by crucifying some 6,000 of the captured slaves along the entire Appian Way, inflicting those excruciating deaths both as punishment and as an exemplary means of deterring any future slave uprisings.
In keeping with those sorts of harsh Roman retributions, a leading European human rights organization has now documented that Israeli forces have begun killing Palestinians by driving over their living bodies with tanks and other military vehicles. Before being pixelated, the original image on the Internet was quite gruesome.
The Body of a Palestinian Prisoner, Crushed Flat While Alive by an Israeli Tank
SEE ALSO: War on Gaza: Images suggest Israel ran over Palestinian detainee with armoured vehicle
I’d assume that many agitated Israelis still believe in the reality of the atrocity-hoax that Hamas beheaded 40 Israeli babies. So perhaps we will soon see the Israelis publicly beheading 400 Palestinian babies in retaliation for that imaginary crime.
Question 4: The Creation of a Jewish State
Has Israel’s 5 month-long military operation in Gaza changed your thinking about the wisdom of creating a Jewish state?
As is the case for most of us, while I was growing up I drew my knowledge of the world from the mainstream media and therefore always had a very positive view of Israel, admiring the great success it had achieved despite the bitter hostility of its Arab neighbors. As a young teenager, I remember celebrating Israel’s bold 1976 Entebbe commando-raid, which successfully freed the hostages held by a group of German and Palestinian terrorists, an incident later depicted in several Hollywood productions.
But for me, the turning point came in 1982, when Israel launched its totally unwarranted invasion of Lebanon. That operation killed many thousands of Lebanese civilians and culminated in the huge massacre at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, in which hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian women and children were butchered, some of them in particularly grisly fashion. Israeli dissident academic Israel Shahak had correctly predicted those shocking events, but I’d dismissed him as a crackpot, so henceforth I took his views much more seriously.
Not long afterward, the New York Times and other leading media outlets revealed that as a young right-wing Zionist leader, Israel’s sitting prime minister had been a great admirer of Fascist Italy, and after World War II broke out, he’d repeatedly sought to enlist his Zionist faction in the Axis military alliance of Hitler and Mussolini. I also eventually discovered that during the 1930s, the mainstream Zionist movement led by David Ben-Gurion had formed a crucial economic partnership with Nazi Germany, which laid the basis for the creation of the State of Israel.
Although those remarkable facts were important, even more important was that such explosive revelations had been successfully concealed for more than forty years by our entire pro-Israel Western media. This convinced me that I couldn’t trust a single word the media said about Israel or the Middle East conflict.
Therefore, over the years and the decades that followed, I gradually sifted through this large mass of dishonest propaganda, seeking to extract a more accurate version of events. As I discussed in a long article late last year, the true circumstances of the creation of Israel in 1948 were really quite outrageous, as heavily armed Zionist settlers, most of them relatively recent arrivals, used a campaign of massacres and brutal atrocities to expel some 800,000 native Palestinians from the lands they’d inhabited for the previous couple of thousand years.
Although these days, the IDF is vastly better armed and can rely upon advanced American-supplied missiles and bombs to inflict most of its destruction, otherwise there doesn’t seem a huge difference between the events of three generations ago and those of today, with Zionist forces in both cases relying upon terror to drive out the inhabitants of the lands they seek to acquire. Indeed, nearly all of today’s Gazans are the descendants of Palestinians who had been violently expelled from their original homes during that earlier round of ethnic cleansing.
Whereas the recent story of Hamas militants roasting an Israeli baby in an oven was merely an atrocity-hoax, we have eyewitness testimony that back in 1948, the Zionist militants did indeed throw a young Palestinian boy into an oven and burn him alive, with his father soon following along behind him.
This raises an interesting point. Psychological projection is an important aspect of human behavior, with individuals often assuming that others think along the same lines as they themselves do. Over the last century or more, agitated Jewish activists have become notorious for falsely accusing their adversaries of committing the most extreme and grotesque atrocities, and I wonder if some of this might not represent their own dreams of the punishments they would wish to inflict upon their enemies if the tables were turned.
A particularly problematic aspect of Israel’s creation comes with regard to a different aspect of Jewish behavior. In a 2018 article I noted the tendency of Jews to cluster together and often work themselves into a dangerous frenzy:
As a rough analogy, a small quantity of uranium is relatively inert and harmless, and entirely so if distributed within low-density ore. But if a significant quantity of weapons-grade uranium is sufficiently compressed, then the neutrons released by fissioning atoms will quickly cause additional atoms to undergo fission, with the ultimate result of that critical chain-reaction being a nuclear explosion. In similar fashion, even a highly agitated Jew may have no negative impact, but if the collection of such agitated Jews becomes too numerous and clusters together too closely, they may work each other into a terrible frenzy, perhaps with disastrous consequences both for themselves and for their larger society. This is especially true if those agitated Jews begin to dominate certain key nodes of top-level control, such as the central political or media organs of a society.
Israel’s Jews obviously constitute the fullest example of such clustering, so perhaps we should not be too surprised at their extremely frenzied ideological chain-reaction of the last five months. Unfortunately, this has resulted in their exceptionally bloody rampage in Gaza, which also seems to be fully endorsed by many or most American Jews, especially the most prominent and influential ones.
A week ago, US President Joe Biden pledged to organize air-drops of aid into northern Gaza. But there is already enough food to feed the entire population stuck in trucks right outside the Rafah crossing. Why doesn’t Biden simply insist that Israel allow that food to be delivered ASAP? Is this just a publicity stunt or is Biden sincere in wanting to feed starving Palestinians?
Ron Unz—I think this strange situation represents the utter and total humiliation of America, despite its boastful claims of being the world’s sole superpower.
We have demonstrated to the entire world that our country has now become nothing more than a political colony of Israel, run by a puppet government under the complete control of the pro-Israel Lobby and its financial donors.
Many have pointed out that although Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is a very weak and besieged figure in his own country, he and his allies certainly exercise greater control over the U.S. Congress, including both Democrats and Republicans, than does President Joe Biden or any Republican leader.
In the British Empire of the late nineteenth century, India had a population many times larger than that of Britain itself, but the subcontinent was entirely under British control. India’s leaders had no say over their own foreign policy, which instead was determined by a few individuals on the other side of the world. I think that America’s relationship to Israel is rapidly approaching that same situation.
President Biden faces a very difficult reelection challenge, with a large portion of his own Democratic voter base outraged over the scenes of devastation and starvation among Gaza’s Palestinians that they are seeing every day on their social media. So he would obviously like to mitigate his political problems by ensuring that food is delivered to Gaza’s starving Palestinians.
However, the Israelis have refused to allow the entry of sufficient trucks carrying food, and since the Israeli government controls the American government rather than the other way round, there’s not much that our President can do against that Israeli refusal. Therefore, Biden has resorted to desperate publicity stunts, such as air-dropping a few pallets of food, hoping that such transparent ploys will deceive his angry voters.
Meanwhile, the Israelis have been gleefully distributing a video on Telegram showing a starving dog in Gaza eating the body of a dead Palestinian child.
The “genocide” moniker has been affixed to Israel like a scarlet letter. Do you think Israel’s leaders really grasp the long-term implications of this designation?
Ron Unz—I think that the Israeli leaders have become so arrogant, so insular, and so confident in their complete political control over the enormous power of the U.S. and its media that they don’t have the slightest concern over what the people of the world think. This explains their very public massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians by bombs, bullets, and starvation.
After all, the Israelis and their Zionist predecessors have been freely committing the worst sort of crimes and atrocities for generations, without ever incurring any penalty. Instead, nearly all of those dark deeds were either successfully concealed by their media allies or have been almost entirely forgotten. As I wrote in early 2020:
Indeed, the inclination of the more right-wing Zionist factions toward assassination, terrorism, and other forms of essentially criminal behavior was really quite remarkable. For example, in 1943 Shamir had arranged the assassination of his factional rival, a year after the two men had escaped together from imprisonment for a bank robbery in which bystanders had been killed, and he claimed he had acted to avert the planned assassination of David Ben-Gurion, the top Zionist leader and Israel’s future founding-premier. Shamir and his faction certainly continued this sort of behavior into the 1940s, successfully assassinating Lord Moyne, the British Minister for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN Peace Negotiator, though they failed in their other attempts to kill American President Harry Truman and British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin, and their plans to assassinate Winston Churchill apparently never moved past the discussion stage. His group also pioneered the use of terrorist car-bombs and other explosive attacks against innocent civilian targets, all long before any Arabs or Muslims had ever thought of using similar tactics; and Begin’s larger and more “moderate” Zionist faction did much the same.
As far as I know, the early Zionists had a record of political terrorism almost unmatched in world history, and in 1974 Prime Minister Menachem Begin once even boasted to a television interviewer of having been the founding father of terrorism across the world.
One of history’s largest terrorist attacks prior to 9/11 was the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by Zionist militants dressed as Arabs, which killed 91 people and largely destroyed the structure. In the famous Lavon Affair of 1954, Israeli agents launched a wave of terrorist attacks against Western targets in Egypt, intending to have those blamed on anti-Western Arab groups. There are strong claims that in 1950 Israeli Mossad agents began a series of false-flag terrorist bombings against Jewish targets in Baghdad, successfully using those violent methods to help persuade Iraq’s thousand-year-old Jewish community to emigrate to the Jewish state…
The enormous extent of pro-Israel influence in world political and media circles meant that none of these brutal attacks ever drew serious retaliation, and in nearly all cases, they were quickly thrown down the memory hole, so that today probably no more than one in a hundred Americans is even aware of them. Furthermore, most of these incidents came to light due to chance circumstances, so we may easily suspect that many other attacks of a similar nature have never become part of the historical record.
When countries develop a sense of total impunity, their actions may steadily escalate. Because Israel and its government were never called to account or punished for any of their crimes, their transgressions steadily became bolder and more daring as the decades went by.
For example, as part of his non-proliferation efforts, President John F. Kennedy was determined to prevent Israel from acquiring nuclear weapons, making that project one of his top foreign policy initiatives. He exerted enormous pressure towards that goal, threatening Israel with a cut-off of all American financial support and initiating the legal destruction of its political lobby, the predecessor of AIPAC. All those American policies were immediately reversed after Kennedy’s 1963 assassination, and in that same 2020 article I outlined the strong, perhaps even overwhelming evidence that Israel’s Mossad played a central role in the death of our President, one of the most famous events of the twentieth century, as well as in the subsequent assassination of his brother Sen. Robert F. Kennedy when the latter ran for President a few years later.
During 1967, Israel launched a deliberate air and sea attack against the U.S.S. Liberty intended to leave no survivors, killing or wounding over 200 American servicemen before word of the attack reached our Sixth Fleet and the Israelis withdrew. That incident was the deadliest assault on an American naval vessel since World War II and if any other nation had been responsible, our country would certainly have declared war. Instead, the American government and media have entirely concealed the history of that event for the last half-century so that even today few Americans are aware that it ever happened.
Then in 2001, Israel faced a desperate crisis as the widespread suicide bombings of the Second Palestinian Intifada threatened its survival, with numerous hostile Arab nations supporting that campaign. But the sudden 9/11 Attacks on America totally changed the strategic situation, allowing the fiercely pro-Israel Neocons to immediately gain control of the stunned George W. Bush administration. Under their influence, the War on Terror became the centerpiece of American foreign policy, and over the next dozen years the world’s sole superpower destroyed most of Israel’s leading regional adversaries including Iraq, Libya, and Syria, while nearly attacking Iran on several occasions. Last year I recapitulated the strong, even overwhelming evidence that Israel’s Mossad had been responsible for the 9/11 Attacks that successfully reversed Israel’s very difficult predicament.
Given three generations of such total Israeli impunity, it’s easy to understand why Israel’s leaders today seem so nonchalant about the charges of genocide their country faces. South Africa provided a 91 page legal brief documenting its accusations to the International Court of Justice, and those jurists affirmed those charges in a series of near-unanimous rulings. Most observers naturally expected that such formidable legal developments would force the Israelis to back away from their Gaza attacks, but the latter instead demonstrated their total contempt for that international body by redoubling their efforts, continuing their bombing while further reducing the food and water available to Gaza’s starving population of two million.
However, it is possible that the government of Israel might be making a serious miscalculation. Their past crimes had been successfully suppressed by the pro-Israel gatekeepers of the mainstream media, preventing nearly all people around the world from ever becoming aware of them. But in recent years our informational landscape has been drastically transformed by the rise of the Internet, social media, and numerous video platforms. These have allowed the horrific unfiltered images of Gaza’s devastation to be seen worldwide, including by a large portion of our electorate, especially the younger Americans who heavily rely upon those new channels of information. The result has been a wave of huge, spontaneous protests across many Western countries and at many American universities.
By breaking the media stranglehold long enjoyed by Israel’s partisans, these technological changes may have important political consequences. Surprisingly large numbers of Democratic voters in Michigan and Minnesota have refused to support President Joe Biden on their primary ballots, raising fears that his November reelection prospects against former President Donald Trump might be slipping away. And in a British by-election, George Galloway, a fierce supporter of Gaza and critic of Israel, won more votes than the combined total of all the candidates from Britain’s major parties, suggesting that concerns over Gaza were becoming an important political issue in that country as well.
Aaron Bushnell’s picture is now circulating on social media sites around the world. The majority of people appear to have been very moved by his extraordinary act of self-sacrifice. In your opinion, has Bushnell’s self-immolation helped to change the way people think about what’s going on in Gaza?
Ron Unz—I think that the consequences may be enormous. I’ve heard the American mainstream media quickly “disappeared” the story after a day or two, so that it had little influence upon the older Americans who rely upon those legacy outlets. But everywhere else—across social media and non-Western broadcasters—the impact must have been gigantic.
Let’s put the shoe on the other foot. Suppose a Russian military serviceman had burned himself alive outside the Kremlin as an act of personal protest against his country’s Ukraine war. Surely the Western media would have treated that event as the biggest story in the world for days, even weeks, declaring that it proved President Vladimir Putin had lost the support of his own people, and his crumbling regime was headed for collapse. The leadership and people of Russia, China, Iran, and all the other countries that are not totally under American media control must view this incident in much the same way.
As far as I know, nothing similar has ever previously occurred in American history, and only very rarely in other countries around the world. A South Vietnamese Buddhist monk set himself on fire in 1963 to protest his government’s policies and a few months later the ruling regime he opposed was overthrown. In 2010 a Tunisian food-vendor immolated himself and his death launched the Arab Spring, bringing down governments all across North Africa and the Middle East. Although America’s dominance over the global media provides a considerable measure of protection against such popular forces, I think our regime may have suffered a major body-blow.
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Media rules our world, being vastly more powerful than tank battalions or nuclear weapons since it acts as a force of mind-control, shaping the thoughts and beliefs of the individuals who deploy those physical weapons. I wouldn’t be surprised if the dollar-value of the global media coverage of Bushnell’s personal sacrifice totaled in the billions. That’s hardly an insignificant sacrificial accomplishment for an unknown 25-year-old lacking any special skills. In fact, it’s difficult to imagine anything else he could have done that had as high a chance of success and greater positive impact.
Bushnell had been raised in an isolated Christian community, aware from his childhood that the founding figure of his own religion had died a horrible death on the Cross in order to redeem mankind. So self-sacrifice and martyrdom had always been a central element of his faith.
Furthermore, any individual who enlists in the military must recognize that he might someday be called upon to make the supreme sacrifice for his own country, and Bushnell was hardly alone in regarding our ruling regime as an illegitimate one, whose policies were completely antithetical to the values of the country he’d sworn to defend. So in some respects, his fate was not so very different from that of any patriotic American military serviceman who died in the flaming wreckage of his destroyed plane or tank.
[Here Ron Unz, as a libertarian, shows his own ignorance and effects of anti-communist brainwash. He doesn't really understand the history of the USSR. Too bad.—Ed.]
For similar reasons, I think that the tens of thousands of dead Gazans did not lose their lives in vain. Instead, their martyrdom has dominated the global media for the last five months, conclusively revealing to the entire world the moral bankruptcy of the international system that had condemned them to their fate.
Probably hundreds of millions of people worldwide have now begun asking themselves questions that they never would have previously considered. I suspect that those responsible for the destruction of Gaza may come to rue the day when they helped open doors that they may eventually wish had been kept tightly shut.
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Salwa Amor
