Warning: This essay contains explicit language and adult content and therefore it is intended only for mature audiences.
“Sing, Goddess, of the rage, of Peleus’ son Achilles,
The accursed rage, which brought pain to thousands of the Achaeans.”
We all know that democracy is precious, but how precious is it exactly?
Is it more precious than the treasures of Baghdad?
Is it more precious than slavery?
Let us consider the case of Israel, that tragic graveyard of humanity, that terrible monument to man’s abasement which recognizes no parallel, that blooming oasis of democracy and freedom in the guise of a nation-state consisting (almost) exclusively of and for the Jews, which since its very inception has been regarded as one of America’s most useful and dependable allies, who so generously repays the enormous sums of financial aid which are given to her annually by sparing her noble benefactor the trouble of seeing the Middle East with its own eyes, for itself. America must fight for democracy and freedom in this nightmarish region, not, as it did in Europe during the two world wars, to rescue Helen from the Trojans and thus to restore honor to the Spartan throne, but to protect the oil, the Israelites, and therefore civilization as such.
The Jewish state is not a whore to be treated like any other, for only a strong Jewish state can prevent the emergence of a strong Islamic one. We must defend Zionism as a bastion against the rising tide of Islamism.
To create a butterfly, nature must give the caterpillar a chance to complete its inexorable march to cocoon. So too must Israel be given Caterpillar-brand bulldozers for its march on the pitiable remains of refugee camps that are somehow supposed to pass for a viable Palestinian homeland, a basis for a future Palestinian state.
“Excuse me, but are y’all about to diss bitches?”
“Shut the fuck up! Hell yeah! Fuck them hoes! Them bitches trying to play me for these ends. Bitches can’t get nothing from me but this dick!”
There is nothing for which a Holocaust survivor cannot be forgiven. Palestine is the pride of the prideless.
“Ain’t nothing worse, you know, than a broke ass hoe, knocking on my door. Cuz other fools might want the honey, but it’s g’s like me that want the money.”
The international community simply cannot continue to tolerate the actions of the Palestinians, whose situation has become so utterly deplorable that many of them no longer even dream of self-assertion, as their fathers and grandfathers once did, but are instead content merely to sacrifice themselves through increasingly impotent explosions of poetry, suicide bombs which confront an ungrateful – innocent? – audience with the disgusting truth of the impossibility of leading a meaningful life as a Palestinian under the conditions which the Jewish state insists are necessary in order to provide peace of mind to the fragile, dehumanized and therefore inhuman psyches of the descendants and relatives of the victims of the Holocaust, that metaphorical genocide of genocides.
Why can’t the Palestinians also lay claim to the rights and privileges which are customarily granted to the victims of Hitler’s evil plot to eradicate Jewry? Are they too not equally deserving of monetary reparations and human dignity?
Though impotent, a suicide bomb is also an informed comment™ of sorts.
“Never put a hoe before your homey. Fuck ‘em and leave ‘em and beg ‘em for their money.”
How many more generations of unspoken, unspeakable suffering must the Palestinians overcome before this cruel alliance of pimp and whore will finally remove its pathetic disguise and confess that they too have been human beings all along?
In what perverse universe does it make sense to place the crimes of the Israelis and the Palestinians on the same level, as if the soldier driving the tank that destroys a home, and the boy symbolically resisting the tank’s advance by hurling rocks at it, should both be sent to the principal’s office to receive one and the same punishment for participating in a mutual life-or-death struggle? As if the philosophers could reduce this entire sordid affair to some inviolable law of bygone patriarchs, or to some invaluable lesson in historical retribution, instead of seeing it as just another meaningless waste of precious human lives which can never be recovered.
Excited by a powerful instinct, the American diplomat works tirelessly to perfect his song, to preserve and perpetuate his philistine race, which is constantly and everywhere threatened by its own shadow. Through his work he devotes himself to anyone who has ever known the quality of pain which he carries in private heroism, the incurable emptiness of the little man who is routinely finding himself humiliated yet ambitious in his job, and therefore lets all his suppressed and perverted impulses for power run riot in his own home, calling it freedom.
But take courage, friendless Palestine, for Obama is unlike a Clinton or a Bush. He exemplifies the audacity of hope and dares to speak of truth. He understands and sympathizes with your terrible condition of infinite plight, your uniquely punishing fate, your concrete nothingness, your farcical Holocaust. You just have to learn to forgive him for that over which he has no control: the fact that for the time being he can only speak in the capacity of the President of the United States. But trust me he still knows a thing or two about disobedience.
Will we ever find a Judas who is both clever and stupid enough to betray such an opportunistic Christ?
“Like the young prodigy said, I think you missed it. Don’t get this mother fucking shit twisted. I’m not Captain Save ‘Em though, but when I get me a big butt hoe, I rescue for a minute, I hit it and I quit it, then I let ‘em go.”
Is Israel even aware of its own self-inflicted losses, or is it too bent on blaming everything on Palestine, simply because it has reserved for itself the right to do so, to recognize that it is also at the same time defeating itself? Who will be left to carry the blame for Israel’s dangerously unmedicated schizophrenia once this brutal campaign to systematically eradicate every remaining trace of Palestine from the face of the earth and from human consciousness finally overcomes the spineless opposition of its lazy patron, thus leaving the international community with little choice but to acquiesce politically to what will have already long since become an unprecedented and despicable fait accompli? What else does the state of Israel need in order to ensure the sanctity of what Netanyahu referred to just the other day as “the viability of the one and only Jewish state”? Does this statement mean that, in Netanyahu’s eyes, the currently existing one and only Jewish state still lacks this mysterious quality of being viable, that the Israel of today remains unviable?
You don’t have to read Marx in order to know that “he who can buy bravery is brave, though a coward.”
“I sit up high on my mother fucking throne. Bitches – just keep out of this mother fucking game, cuz the mother fucking murder squad is getting paid.”
Let us conclude, then, at the very least, that the real value of democracy in the Middle East will remain unknowable for us until we are willing to pay an even dearer price than the two and a half billion dollars which we give each year in exchange for the privileged honor of Israel’s friendship. It is going to take a lot more than this two and a half billion dollars for us to buy the fraternization of impossibilities that we so emphatically desire for the region, to make these contradictions embrace each other once and for all, so that we might one day finally be able to bring our beloved servants back home and shower them with the affection and gratitude befitting those thankless songbirds.
Until then keep charging it to a bitch: there is only Palestine.
Free Palestine already you miserable forgeries of human beings.
Anthony Burton
June 19, 2011
Psalm 2
1 Why do the nations conspire
and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth rise up
and the rulers band together
against the LORD and against his anointed, saying,
3 “Let us break their chains
and throw off their shackles.”
4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
the Lord scoffs at them.
5 He rebukes them in his anger
and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
6 “I have installed my king
on Zion, my holy mountain.”
7 I will proclaim the LORD’s decree:
He said to me, “You are my son;
today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
and I will make the nations your inheritance,
the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron[b];
you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”
10 Therefore, you kings, be wise;
be warned, you rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the LORD with fear
and celebrate his rule with trembling.
12 Kiss his son, or he will be angry
and your way will lead to your destruction,
for his wrath can flare up in a moment.
Blessed are all who take refuge in him.
Anthony Burton
June 19, 2011
Well speaking realistically here the only remaining hope is that Bill Gates will decide to intervene and unite us. But he doesn’t seem to understand that he’s Genghis Khan and that some of us would also like to own horses so we can be Mongols too.
newageblues
June 19, 2011
I’m with you, Tha’ Ratt’ler. Israel’s actual behavior is bad enough that there’s no need to lose credibility and divide their opposition by exaggerating. Just the facts, please, is what’s needed.
Tha Ratt'ler
May 26, 2011
Sounds reasonable Tony. I look forward to reading any revisions you think will help elucidate your position.
-Ben
Anthony Burton
May 26, 2011
Ben,
Unfortunately work has kept me busy the last few days, but I would like to propose the following. Give me some time, say half a week, to make revisions to the essay. This would allow me to answer your question directly but without getting trapped in a question that I find paradoxically fair and unreasonable. Then maybe you can tell me if I have failed in my attempt to delve into the philosophical assumptions and implications of this messy Palestine business.
Tha' Ratt'ler
May 23, 2011
You can call me Ben.
I will agree to answer what “system” is on the single condition that you answer the following question, either yes or no:
Is Israel trying to methodically annihilate all existing elements of Palestine/the Palestinians from the face of the earth and from human knowledge and memory?
I eagerly await your reply.
Anthony Burton
May 23, 2011
Define system, Rattler. If I wanted the dictionary’s definition I would have gone to the dictionary. Give me yours.
And how exactly is this question not addressing the essential substance of your reply?
Tha' Ratt'ler
May 23, 2011
Mr. Burton, I await your response to the substance of my post, that is to say, the argument. While I am waiting on that, I will address the points you raise in your responses:
How does suggesting that it is I who is the one being self-righteous, and that visiting the benighted warzone that is Gaza, would perhaps cure me of this (presumably by converting me to your way of thinking?) either refute my argument or buttress your own claims? You have completely avoided addressing my primary charge. This suggests to me that you are either unwilling or unable to refute my argument. To wit, that your claim that the Israeli state has a standing, organized policy to eradicate Palestine even in human memory is, on its face, untrue.
In my post, I agreed that Israeli policy is in fact brutal, humiliating, and arguably criminal, in addition to being unsustainable and anti-democratic. Perhaps your over-heated rhetoric has blinded you to the fact that, beneath the level of polemicizing, we are in closer agreement than you seem to realize.
[Regarding the definition of the word "system," I will not deign to drag this argument into the petty level of semantics. I refer you to a dictionary for the definition.]
And to your last post: “Yes. The deplorable, intellectual dishonest message here is to stop supporting the murderous campaign against the Palestinians and recognize the inhumanity of what has been done in the name of Israeli security.”
It appears that you are the one who is having difficulty “reading a text.” I did not suggest that your “dishonest message” was that Israel is conducting an inhumane and murderous campaign against the Palestinians. I wrote (and still maintain) that your claim that there is an Israeli campaign to “systematically eradicate every remaining trace of Palestine from the face of the earth and from human consciousness” is false. Do you see what the difference is? Permit me an analogy:
In the 1930s-1940s, The Nazis attempted to murder all the Jews they possibly could. At the same time, The Japanese also behaved rather monstrously – murderously – in China (and throughout its colonial empire). However it would be patently false to claim that, however monstrous Japanese actions were, that what they were doing was on a par with what the Nazis were doing.
This is not splitting hairs. This is about being accurate. You can condemn Israeli policies for many things, but you are undercutting your own argument by claiming that the Israelis are in fact going beyond the Nazis by trying to annihilate even the memory of the existence of the Palestinians (the Nazis, after all, built a freakish “Jewish Museum” to teach about Jews to generations born after the Final Solution was fully executed). By moving beyond hyperbole into something which is simply false you open up your entire argument to dismissal. This is what is meant by the term “intellectual dishonesty.”
However, in your terse retorts, you do not address any of this, that is, the substance of my posts, preferring to snipe in snarky tone, which does not in any way resemble what is referred to as “debate.”
-B. Allen
Anthony Burton
May 23, 2011
“And you do this solely to make a rhetorical/political point. ” Yes. The deplorable, intellectual dishonest message here is to stop supporting the murderous campaign against the Palestinians and recognize the inhumanity of what has been done in the name of Israeli security.
Are you just rehearsing lines here or do you in fact actually know how to read a text?
Anthony Burton
May 23, 2011
Maybe you should enlighten me on what a system is.
Anthony Burton
May 23, 2011
Pulling the self-righteous card, eh? Go to the Gaza Strip sometime.
Tha' Ratt'ler
May 22, 2011
“…brutal campaign to systematically eradicate every remaining trace of Palestine from the face of the earth and from human consciousness…”
It is precisely this kind of bombastic, self-righteously hyperbolic, and profoundly disingenuous rhetoric that makes many opponents of Israeli policies so utterly impossible to stomach. There is no systematized program of genocide being carried out on the Palestinian people. There is certainly a great degree of dehumanizing, degrading, and humiliating militaristic practices which range from the heavy-handed to the criminal. There are many policies which fly in the face of (that greatest of non-existent notions) “International Law.” (I will say that settlements and such make a mockery of good faith, and for the meantime leave it at that – Rather mild, but at least honest). There is the bamboozling of American taxpayers for billions every year by a nation that has the temerity to use some of that money to spy upon us, their erstwhile protectors and allies. There is worse. There is NOT, however, any kind of systematized program planned and carried out for the purpose of eradicating either the Palestinian people or their culture. Rob them of their land? Certainly (at least a good bit of it). Punish the collective for the murderous and cowardly crimes of the few? Yes. But to claim that the Israeli state is, not in so many words, carrying out a systematic policy of genocide of the entirety of the Palestinian people is just factually wrong, over and above being morally reprehensible. And you do this solely to make a rhetorical/political point. This betrays an intellectual dishonesty that is both stunning and deplorable.
Reasonable people can disagree about bewilderingly complex and fractious issues such as this, but first you have to stop casually throwing out wholly fabricated lies. I had hoped to see better commentary here, even from those I am not 100% in agreement with.