There are no limits
JVL Introduction
Peter Beinart talks not just about the latest Donald Trump pronouncement that the US will “take over” Gaza but with controlled rage at American Jewish community leaders who, he believes, will simply go along with it.
“I watched my community. I watched my people in the United States. And I began to notice something. There was no limit. There was nothing that Israel could do where the organized Jewish community in the United States would say: enough. There was no independent moral standard. Israel would act, and then there would be a post hoc justification of explaining why actually this was totally legitimate and in fact quite praiseworthy, or at the very least necessary.”
Putting this development in its wider context, Beinart links it to Trump’s imperialist ambitions on Greenland and beyond.
“This,” affirms Beinart, “is the world without moral limits. The world with absolute disregard for the humanity of people who are not white and Christian, or Judeo-Christian, and Western.”
RK
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Wed 5 Feb 2025. Read the original here.
From Greenland to Gaza
The New American Imperialism
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Terrifying. Gaza is merely the overture to the mad king’s tragedy; no country is safe, no people are sacred, no culture, history, learning, love of native landscape, family history stretching back generations, none of this matters because Gaza is real estate and there is money to be made.
People are being silenced by the mass media, even on social platforms, and those that don’t comply with state interference are banned from operating. With the rise of the extreme right who are freely platformed even by the BBC – we are being squeezed out of the picture. The general direction in the west is whatever American capitalism says goes.
The most biting put down for a tyrant in the Arab Muslim world is to call him Fir’aun. The Pharaoh. An oppressor of – this might seem ironic to some – of Jews. Fira’un – who abused power in the extreme – to the extent that he set himself up as a god, surrounded by an evil, opportunistic sycophantic “priesthood”. Each fake god has a fake set of morals, a fake set of criteria for right and wrong, to suit its own not actually divine purposes. It’s high time people started thinking about what idolatry actually means. Thanks for the reminder.