I watched a mercifully short debate on YouTube today, a clip from Piers Morgan Uncensored. The guests were Zionist lawyer Alan Dershowitz and Palestinian-American columnist Omar Baddar. (Piers Morgan Uncensored airs on heavily-censored TalkTv, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. It is rebroadcast on heavily-censored YouTube.) Morgan began the segment by arguing that the world began on October 7. Dershowitz was then given a few minutes to rattle off a series of lies about poor, long-suffering Israel, the world-champion victim. All propaganda.
So, after Dershowitz had finished his three minutes, Baddar had three minutes to respond. Well, that's fair, isn't it? 3 = 3. No, three does not equal three. It would have taken an honest person hours to explain why each of the bullet points that Dershowitz spewed was historically, and currently, an inversion of the truth. Moreover, Dershowitz was playing defence lawyer the whole time, objecting to Baddar. Despite all that, Baddar did a great job. I have to say, I began watching this short clip knowing that the dice was stacked against Baddar. The dice is always stacked against the truth on these shows. The producers of these shows have the power to accomplish their goals: pervert the truth and promote the powerful.
I read through the comments to see how people responded to this. At least the comments that make it through YouTube's censorship. There were thousands of comments when I looked, just a few hours after it had been posted. Almost no one was fooled. They tore Morgan and Dershowitz apart. People know that a genocide is underway and they aren't happy about it. Dershowitz is happy about it. Morgan is okay with it if it furthers his career. There were a few bots and shills and creeps in the comment section, but they were irrelevant. It looked like people have learned not to waste their time with them.
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Alan Dershowitz is the cream of the crop of academic Zionists. Harvard law professor. He's the go-to guy if you want to defend and promote colonialism, imperialism, and genocide. He is held in especially high regard by the organization Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. SPME claims to promote civil and respectful debate about Israel on university campuses. However, they praise Dershowitz for calling John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt “bigots” and “liars” in relation to their scholarly work The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
As we will see in the next post, it is unwise to underestimate the influence of SPME in North American academia. Here is their mission statement in full:
SPME is an international community of scholars dedicated to promoting academic integrity in the study of the Middle East, particularly with regard to the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. The organization embraces standards that have made modern universities and colleges centers of scholarship, creativity, knowledge, and academies of free and civil discourse. SPME is committed to facilitating campus discussions while striving to bring together individuals of varying views who share a good faith desire for knowledge, understanding and peace.
We hold to a standard of academic free speech, where any view that wishes to be heard must also submit to rational, empirically-grounded criticism. To that end, we combat the increasingly politicized scholarship in Middle East Studies programs and related academic areas of study which obsess over denouncing Israel, the only democracy in the region, while silencing any effort to either counter misinformation or provide context.
With our faculty network we promote the kind of research and discussion that enables all of us to develop effective solutions to modern day conflicts, and to achieve that kind of peace in which different peoples thrive together.
We consider the current phenomenon of BDS as a tragic example of the perils involved in abusing scholarship. This movement, now widespread on university campuses around the world, constitutes a threat not only to Israel, but to the very integrity of academia as a forum of free and responsible scholarly inquiry and research.
I stumble over the word “context” in the context of SPME's mission statement. This is how I read it: “We at SPME can explain away any and all atrocities that Israel commits if we can just get you to see things our way. We just need you to accept our facts as well as our institutional authority that allows us to bury your facts and refuse to entertain your anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist perspective.”
But it's not working. These pro-Zionists are losing. They don't seem to know yet that they are facing a crisis of legitimacy. How did that come about?
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What is happening right now, as I type?
I have always been interested in how groups of people form communities. How do national identities form in such a way that a country can willingly be taken to war by its leaders? How can a population demand that its leaders take them to war? Specifically, how and why do Zionist Israelis applaud the current genocide of Palestinians?
We are in a new global context in which everyone has a camera and can post to social media real-time evidence of what they are experiencing for – literally – all the world to see. This is creating a new social formation on a global scale. We can see bombs shatter hospitals as they land. We can hear the missiles whistling towards their targets and pulverizing buildings and people on contact. We can see Israeli soldiers harass children and arrest them for nothing in the West Bank, as it happens. Children! We can see Israeli settlers actually shooting to death Palestinians to steal their land. We can see hundreds of thousands of Palestinians being forced on a death march through the rubble that used to be their homes before criminal Israeli fighter pilots destroyed them. We can see dead babies in incubators whose power was cut. We can see bodies being pulled out of the rubble. We can wonder how those poor people suffered in their slow death. When I say “we,” I mean people all around the globe: Those who like dropping bombs and colonizing people as well as those who get bombs dropped on them and resist oppression. We can all see it now. But that's not all.
We can also now see, as it happens, Israeli officials assuring the population that they will continue the carnage until they complete the genocide. It turns out that most people around the world don't like genocide. Most people seem to be outraged and sickened by the spectacle coming out of Palestine. And we can see Zionist Israelis posting videos to Tik Tok that make fun of the Palestinians who are being murdered and tortured. These Israelis are demanding more death and more torture of children. Of babies. This is all happening in real-time. And the whole world, outside of Zionist circles, is sickened.
For those of us who are trying to understand how a people can be so inhuman, there are answers. There are Israelis – Jewish, Christian, and Muslim – who have asked this question to try to understand their own society. They not only write scholarly books, but discuss the issue on the Internet where people around the world can see it. The Jewish critics are often the most pessimistic. Gideon Levy has been telling us for years that Israelis have a deep-seated hatred of Palestinians. They applaud their slaughter. Nurit Peled has written books on how the Israeli educational system creates a population with no empathy towards Palestinians. Students are taught to hate. Jewish dissidents like Ronnie Barkan describe in detail the way that the Apartheid state of Israel oppresses Palestinians. Israeli soldiers describe the horrors that they visited on Palestinians during their compulsory military service. We see how they were left on their own to recover their humanity. We can listen to anti-Zionist Israelis demolish the lies of Western academics and government officials. We can see the resilience and courage of the Palestinian resistance just as easily.
We know more than those who are lecturing us. Not just the university professors and administrations of the SPME. We know more than the Western governments that are supporting and perpetrating this carnage. They are losing all legitimacy. It's too late to get it back. We've seen Blinkin, Biden, and Sullivan lie to us as they annihilate Palestinians. In all our countries, the people know more than those who are trying to gaslight us.
My sense is that, in the Arab and Muslim countries, the people can no longer be contained. If the Israelis resume their genocidal attack on Gaza today or tomorrow, then the people will force their governments to act. Hezbollah and Houthis will begin a major campaign. Gloves off. Erdogan will finally have to cut off Israel's oil supply. King Abdullah will be forced to bring Jordan into the fray. The Egyptian masses will no longer allow Palestinians to be murdered on their doorstep.
I do not think that Israel will be able to resume the genocide without starting a very dangerous regional war. But Israel is like a spoiled brat who has been given nuclear weapons to play with. Israel is a country of spoiled brats. That judgment is not only mine, but is the determination of critical Israelis, some of whom I have cited above. Moreover, it's not just me who thinks that. It is the judgment of the world's population who now have access to the Internet.
The Internet was imagined to be a tool of control. Intelligence services and governments have been working to make cellphones instruments of surveillance and control. But, for the moment, the opposite has happened. Both in the Global South and the West, people are conscious of the reality of imperialism and colonialism. And they don't like it.
Next time, I'm going to post about the hypocrisy of the SPME in Canadian universities that I know well. But, I better publish this post first. I would hate for the world to end before I managed to announce it publicly.