Jordan And Egypt Snub Trump's Ethnic Cleansing Plan
Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Both Jordan and Egypt have put out statements rejecting President Trump’s proposal to “clean out” Gaza and move its population to those nations.
“Our principles are clear, and Jordan’s steadfast position to uphold the Palestinians’ presence on their land remains unchanged and will never change,” Jordan’s foreign minister Ayman Safadi told the press on Sunday.
Similarly, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry affirmed “Egypt’s continued support for the resilience of the Palestinian people on their land and their commitment to their legitimate rights in their homeland, in accordance with international law and international humanitarian law.”
It still remains to be seen if the Trump administration will find a way to bribe or coerce either or both nations to comply with Trump’s ethnic cleansing agenda, but the fact that they aren’t already on board means the empire still needs to jump through some significant hoops before this could happen.
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In response to my write-up about Trump’s plans to purge Gaza of Palestinians I’ve been getting a nice eclectic mix of American rightists telling me “Stop calling it ethnic cleansing, Trump’s just trying to rescue those people from a destroyed Gaza!” and Israeli rightists going “Haha yes, Trump will help us ethnically cleanse the terrorists and their spawn.”
Trump supporters are such shitbrained, knuckle-dragging bootlickers. They’re all up in my social media replies going “Well what do you expect Trump to do? What other possible solution is there but to empty out the population of Gaza to neighboring Arab countries?” And of course the obvious humanitarian solution is a heroic multinational push to rush massive amounts of aid to Gaza while rebuilding it at the expense of the states who destroyed it — but nope, they can’t even entertain that possibility. Only possible solution is to bend over backwards to give Israel the exact thing it’s desired from Gaza for many years, which will just coincidentally happen to delight Trump’s Zionist megadonors.
Worthless human livestock. Trump supporters claim to oppose wars and despise the neocons, but are always consistently paced into supporting all the worst agendas of the nastiest swamp monsters in Washington. Trump supporters are George W Bush supporters LARPing as Ron Paul supporters.
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Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah is free after days of imprisonment by Swiss authorities for expressing wrongthink about Israel.
When these things happen, it’s important to ensure that we make it cost them more than it benefits them. Make sure it damages Zionist PR interests more than it protects those PR interests from damage. Use their iron-fisted authoritarian crackdowns to help show the world how much tyranny and abuse is necessary to uphold a status quo which has no basis in fact or morality.
If Israel and its western backers were standing on the side of truth and justice, they wouldn’t be persecuting journalists for sharing inconvenient ideas and information. Every time they do so it should be brightly spotlighted and loudly amplified, to draw attention to the very tyrannical power structure whose public image they are trying to protect.
Any time they forcefully silence efforts to draw attention to their tyranny, make sure it draws more attention to their tyranny. Any time they assault freedoms of assembly and the press to gain a yard, make sure it costs them ten. By doing this, at the very least we help change the cost-to-benefit analysis of our rulers when calculating whether such authoritarian measures are worthwhile, and at the most we harness their force and use it directly against them to weaken them in ways we never could without their help.
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If you’ve been ignoring or defending Biden’s genocidal criminality these last 15 months, then I don’t really care what you have to say about Trump or Musk or any of their cohorts. Your criticisms might be 100 percent accurate, but they’re not coming from a place of truth.
If you moved seamlessly from aggressively attacking Biden’s abuses to aggressively attacking Trump’s, then you have my attention, because I know your criticisms are coming from actual principles and not blind opposition to an opposing political faction. You are standing against tyranny instead of standing with one of America’s two tyrannical parties.
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It should deeply disturb us that there is no difference in worldview between the political class and the media class.
Ever think about how weird and freakish that is? Western pundits and reporters all have the exact same models for looking at the world as western politicians and government officials. They break down ideologically along exactly the same narrow “progressive-ish versus conservative-ish” spectrum of debate; they all agree on who the Good Guys and Bad Guys are on the world stage; they all subscribe to the same perspectives on how electoral politics work, how their government works, how the economy works and how power works. They don’t agree on every issue, but they all share the exact same conceptual frameworks for understanding the world which form the basis of their agreements and disagreements.
This is one of the things that makes western propaganda so effective: the fact that there is no discrepancy at all between the way our governments describe the way the world works and the way all the most prominent journalists, analysts and pundits do. They never make any mention of the fact that we’re all being psychologically hammered with mass-scale propaganda every day to manipulate the way we think, speak, vote and work. They ignore the fact that our elections are fake and everything we were taught in school about our government is a lie. They deny the self-evident reality that the US-centralized empire is by far the most murderous and tyrannical force on this planet and is the source of most of the world’s problems. They all pretend capitalism is working fine and we will surely figure out how to consume our way out of our soaring injustices and looming ecological collapse any minute now. They all completely redact from their worldview the inconvenient truth that we are ruled by sociopathic plutocrats who are driving us to our doom.
The fact that government and political bodies omit from their perspective all the same information that pundits and reporters do means power never gets held to account by the press, because they’re all viewing the actions of the powerful through the same fraudulent reality tunnel. This creates giant dark spots on the field of information in which immense depravities can hide, thereby allowing a gravely disordered status quo to continue uncontested by the news-consuming public.
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Here’s an argument that you may want to direct at religious Jews -
“One of the things that you hear most frequently from Israel’s defenders is that it has a right to exist. And I think this phrase is really important to think about.
One of my heroes is the Orthodox Jewish Israeli philosopher, Yeshayahu Leibowitz. And Leibowitz was very explicit about this. Leibowitz said Israel has no right to exist because no state has a right to exist. States are instruments. States are instruments to protect human life and to allow for human flourishing. Leibowitz came at this from a theological perspective as an Orthodox Jew. It was very clear to him that the only thing that was created in the image of God were human beings.
This is the point that Abraham Joshua Heschel made very clearly as well. When speaking about idolatry, Heschel made the point that to see anything as created in the image of God, other than the human being—whether it’s a building or a statue or a tree or a star, any of that—is idolatrous. Because the only thing, according to Torah, that is created in the image of God is the human being.
And so, what Leibowitz was saying was when you see an inherent value in states beyond their instrumental value, you are imagining that they have a value in and above the value of the human beings who reside within those states. And that is idolatry because it makes them sacred, and it places their value above the lives of the human beings who live within that state. And it is the human beings, not the state, that is created in the image of God.
And that’s why I think that much of the establishment Jewish discourse about Israel has become, in Leibowitz’s terms, idolatrous. Because this phrase, ‘right to exist,’ is again and again used as a way of trumping the value of the people who live within this territory, and saying: no, no, I’m not going to take moral responsibility for what is being done to those people who live under the control of the state of Israel—half of whom are Palestinian—because the rights of the state trump the rights of those individuals. And that is to make the state an idol.
And that is what Leibowitz saw as a grave, grave sin. It is important to remember that idolatry is just about the most serious sin there is in Judaism. It’s one of only three that you cannot perform, even at risk of death. The Talmud says that opposing idolatry is the very definition of being a Jew. And that’s why I think it’s so important to understand the idolatry that has crept into Jewish discussion of Israel and to oppose that idolatry.”
- Peter Beinart, Substack 1/27/25
Best effort in awhile. I adore how you call out fascists who simp for psychopathic billionaires, i.e., Trump. The American government is beyond reform. America has instituted the Fourth Reich and must be overthrown.