Asking day 2

 

Another day, another thousands of starving Gaza children, another vigorous social media argument between the well nourished: would Trump be worse for the Palestinians than Biden? Perhaps we should ask this child, Leila Jeneid. Her starvation is graphically photographed in the Daily Mail.

Leila Jeneid is lightly skipped over by the NYT today. I don't mean that they lowered themselves by mentioning her. If she has not been discovered by a rightwing Israeli quasi-journalist and propagandist Anat Schwartz, she doesn't exist. Instead, the NYT has moved on to the post-war. Goodbye, starving kids.

In an article about drafting orthodox young men into the Israeli army – much more interesting than mere famine – the NYT provides a fascinating view of its own politics:

"A new Israeli government led by centrists is unlikely to take a markedly different approach to the war in Gaza, but it may be more open to allowing the Palestinian leadership in the Israeli-occupied West Bank to play a bigger role in Gaza after the war. That arrangement could create a more conducive environment for Israel to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, which had edged closer to sealing diplomatic ties with Israel before the war broke out."

Ah Bidenism! This is north star guiding the Biden administration, providing the bandage of a quisling Palestinian administration absolutely in the power of Israel while bringing together our best friends – the tyrants of Saudi Arabia and the fascists of Israel! Why, the lion will lie down with the lion after eating the lamb’s guts, eyes, face, legs and tail.

It is a happy world, and one in which there will be no consequences for mass murder in Gaza.

Well, beyond the criminality of this point of view, we are back once again to pure Bushism. The entire Iraq occupation – which the NYT was all for - was about wishing away the present, subtracting it from the if-then calculations about the future, and substituting a free trade utopia, where the oil companies flowed like wine. Democracy was in the air, as long as the democracy didn’t represent the real wishes of the Iraqis, which would be just awful. Plan after plan was earnestly discussed by the Bush Vulcans, and reverently reported on by the best and the brightest NYT reporters.

There's a teensy weensy problem, though, with subtracting the present from one's calculations about the future. It leads to completely futile and insane conclusions.

But heck, that is negative thinking! And thus, the perfect fit for the DC-Centrist press mindset is going great guns in America, save on the nasty social media. And the solution to that is simply to ban Tik Tok. I mean, the low information voter might get the idea that their leaders are war criminals with the ability to calculate of broken ChatGPTs. And that would lead to conspiracy thinking and such!

So here we go again. While all the kids starve to death.