Ignore What Western Officials Say About Israel; Watch Their Actions Instead
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Another fake, stupid story is making headlines in the mass media today about how bad and wrong President Biden secretly believes Israel’s actions in Gaza are. NBC News is now reporting that Biden has been referring to Benjamin Netanyahu as an “asshole” in private conversations and saying the assault in Gaza “has to stop”.
“Biden has grown steadily more frustrated with the rising Palestinian civilian death toll in Gaza — now a reported 28,000 — and Netanyahu’s reluctance to pursue a long-term peace agreement,” NBC News reports.
Buried all the way down in paragraph 15 of the article, we get to the real story:
“Yet, even as Biden has escalated his rhetoric, he is not yet prepared to make significant policy changes, officials said. He and his aides continue to believe his approach of unequivocally supporting Israel is the right one.”
All the relevant information in this news story that’s getting so much attention today is contained in paragraph 15. None of the words outside of paragraph 15 matter. Paragraph 15 is the whole entire story.
The Biden administration keeps feeding these bogus stories to the press about how “frustrated” they are with Israel’s insistence on massacring civilians with unbelievable savagery, without ever actually making any meaningful policy changes or taking any meaningful actions to stop it. The White House has expressed “concerns” about Israel’s actions in Gaza in more than 20 statements, all without any actual, real-life steps having been taken to curb those actions in any way.
It’s absurd to pretend that the things Biden is privately thinking and feeling about Israel and Gaza are of any interest or significance when Biden is actively backing Israel’s atrocities and bombing anyone in the middle east who tries to stop them. Biden’s feelings aren’t going to stop kids from getting ripped to shreds by Israeli massacres Rafah.
(As an aside, it’s also absurd to pretend Biden thinks anything of any relevance at all given what we now know about the state of his cognitive decline. Even if he really did call the Israeli prime minister an asshole in private conversations, for all we know he was talking about a long-dead Israeli prime minister from his senate days like Ariel Sharon. Hell, he could’ve been talking about the president of Mexico.)
The White House could end this with a phone call, just as it ended the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon with a phone call in 1982. Israel is fully dependent on the United States to perpetrate these mass atrocities in Gaza, and the Israelis are fully aware of this. The genocidal massacres have continued in Gaza for four months because the US empire wants them to continue.
But the shitlib media have taken this ridiculously fake “Biden wants Netanyahu to stop but he just won’t” story and run with it. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell just got together with Washington Post columnist David Ignatius to tell their brainwashed viewers that we’re looking at a “showdown” between the brave and righteous Biden and the sinister and murderous Netanyahu.
Really these institutions are just telling American progressives what they want to hear, in the same way Israeli officials provide liberal-sounding messaging for western audiences while spouting genocidal rhetoric in Hebrew to their own citizens. The Biden administration is feeding pleasing sound bites to the mass media about the president saying mean things about Netanyahu in order to placate their base, while having their foot firmly on the gas pedal of concrete actions toward continuing the genocide in Gaza.
This is just what Democrat presidencies look like. Republican presidents like Trump and Bush just come right out say things like they invaded Syria “to take the oil” and they invaded Iraq because God told them to, whereas the Bidens and the Obamas have to make it look pretty. Obama spent eight years feeding eloquent words to the public while continuing and expanding all the most depraved aspects of the Bush administration, thus accomplishing the necessary straddle of facilitating the violence and tyranny of the empire while simultaneously allowing liberals to feel good about themselves.
That’s why you’re seeing this phony song and dance about Biden and Netanyahu being secretly at odds, even while the Biden White House explicitly says “We’re going to continue to support Israel” when asked if they’ve ever threatened to withhold military support if Israel commits war crimes in Rafah.
Western officials keep babbling about how “concerned” they are about what’s happening in Gaza without actually doing anything. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, British Labour leader Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly have all been making use of the word “concern” with regard to Gaza so as to be seen as publicly fretting about Israel’s actions without actually presenting any concrete opposition to them.
The correct response to all this lip service to the stated values of the liberal international order is to ignore their words and watch their actions. This is good advice for government policy on Israel and Gaza, and it’s good advice for all other government policy too.
Words can be used to spin narratives and manage perception in ways that concrete actions cannot. Disregard the narrative spin and the public statements and watch the concrete, physical movements of money, weapons and resources. That’s how you penetrate through the distortions of the propaganda matrix and distinguish fact from empty word stories.
Ignore their official public statements and the unofficial public statements they feed the press; watch their actions instead. Disregard what they say and watch what they do. That will show you their true position. That will tell you who they are.
_______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Go here to buy paperback editions of my writings from month to month. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations: 1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
Featured image via Picryl (Public Domain).
Your words of caution are very timely Caitlin and they need to be said, especially for the benefit of younger and less experienced players.
But for old campaigners like myself who vividly remember the "Good Cop, Bad Cop" games that the war criminals Nixon and Kissinger tried to play with Vietnamese Peace negotiator Le Duc Tho in the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the latest incarnation of this duplicitous routine comes as no surprise at all. The Americans have turned dissembling and deception into an art form.
Welcome to theater of the absurd. Genocide Joe and Justin Trudeau shouldn't be in office. Biden is too senile, Trudeau is too stupid. 75% of Canadians want Trudeau's resignation.
Needless to say Biden will distance himself from Netanyahu as the election approaches having forgotten that on Oct. 10th last year he could have shut down the genocide and saved thousands of lives and his country a lot of grief and global condemnation. It is totally insane this dumb old f--ker shows his face in public let alone run for president. Like Hillary Clinton before him he is a certified war criminal.
Our hope now is that both leaders have an encounter with a banana peel or a bar of soap in a slippery bathtub .
Hope springs eternal!