By William Skink
Is America becoming globally isolated? Sure, there is a good argument to be made for that assertion, but America will never be alone as long as its global ambitions align with the other two members of the deranged triumvirate America leads, spreading death and chaos and pushing the world toward war.
As I was listening to NPR on the way to work last week I thought to myself there truly is no better arena to see the horrendous impacts of domestic propaganda on the American populace than the arena of foreign policy. It’s simply amazing what Americans don’t know, and don’t seem to care to know.
Last week Tillerson announced that the US will maintain a military presence in Syria indefinitely. One of the stated reasons is to make sure ISIS doesn’t re-emerge. That is utter bullshit. Why? Because the deranged triumvirate we are a part of created and continue to use ISIS to justify military incursions and occupations for control of resources.
I believe and will continue to claim that Obama’s 8 years of continued military intervention, after Bush’s years of exploiting 9/11 to rip open the Middle East, has rendered the vast majority of the political spectrum utterly incapable of speaking or acting honestly about American foreign policy. The rest of the world knows this, but the entitled arrogance of American Exceptionalism has allowed the American populace to live inside a cocoon of privileged ignorance about the carnage wrought by the triumvirate.
Americans are told about the dire protests in Iran but never shown the realities of the apartheid state of Israel. You won’t hear Angelina Jolie—celebrity propagandist for NATO—talk about Israel’s persecution of Ahed Tamimi. When women marched this past weekend in America, were any of them thinking about the hyper-militarized culture of Israel that apparently is so fragile a 16 year old’s defiance can cause these kinds of reactions?
The discussion amongst Israelis became all about the humiliation suffered by heavily armed soldiers, from a fearless 16-year old girl and her bare hands. Culture Minister Miri Regev said: “When I watched that, I felt humiliated, I felt crushed”. She called the incident “damaging to the honor of the military and the state of Israel.” She was echoing her own words from 2015, when Ahed also appeared in a viral video, wrestling a masked Israeli soldier, who was holding her little brother in a headlock and pressing him down on a rock, his broken arm in cast. Then Regev was “shocked to see the video this morning of Palestinians hitting an IDF soldier,” adding that, “It cannot be that our soldiers will be sent on missions with their hands tied behind their backs. It’s simply a disgrace!….We must immediately order that a soldier under attack be able to return fire. Period.”
There was a range of suggestions of what should happen with Ahed and the other girls.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett suggested that they “spend the rest of their days in prison”.
But a prominent journalist had a somewhat more cunning suggestion:
“In the case of the girls, we should exact a price at some other opportunity, in the dark, without witnesses and cameras”,
Ben Caspit wrote in his article (Hebrew) on Tuesday.
A teenage Palestinian girl is being threatened—IN PRINT—with implied sexual assault. Where is the outrage in America? Where are the big headlines in the New York Times and Washington Post? Where are the celebrities wearing pins?
I am not the only one who sees the women’s march as nothing more than a scheme to lead “the resistance” into the complicit arms of Democrats. There is no serious attempt to create solidarity with oppressed women across the globe and some women activists know this:
In Los Angeles the Palestinian American Women’s Association have pulled out of Women’s March L.A in protest over the inclusion of actress Scarlett Johansson as a featured speaker. The star has made public her support of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.
Palestinian activist Sana Ibrahim said that the Woman’s March call for human rights “does not extend to Palestinian human rights”. In Philadelphia some black and brown woman activists have called for other activist to boycott the march over the concerns that the march organizers are collaborating with police.
If the resistance is solely focused on voting it will fail. If the last election wasn’t enough to expose the utter corruption of our two party political system I don’t know what will. The sad reality is this: the Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements.
As someone who continued being against US imperialism even as the neoliberal messiah lulled liberals into a deep slumber for 8 years, I have no party. There is no political party or social movement that offers a substantive opposition of American militarism.
Even worse, the vast majority of Americans remain dangerously ignorant about what the deranged triumvirate continue to do to achieve its geopolitical goals of dominating natural resources and countering the rise of other power centers in an increasingly multipolar world.
