Global

It’s amazing how America’s thought-controlled media is able to come up with a suitable narrative almost immediately whenever there is an international incident that might be subject to multiple interpretations. Since 1948 Israel has expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes, has occupied nearly all of the historic Palestine, has empowered its army to kill thousands of local people, and has more recently established an apartheid regime that even denies that Palestinian Arabs are human in the same sense that Jews are. Netanyahu-allied government minister Ayelet Shaked memorably has called for Israel not only to exterminate all Palestinian children, whom she has described as “little snakes,” but also to kill their mothers who gave birth to them.

“(Tutsis) are cockroaches. We will kill you.”

 Arabs are like “drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

 The first quote was a line repeated frequently by the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines, a Rwandan radio station, which is largely blamed for inciting hatred towards the Tutsi people. 

 The second is by former Israeli army Chief-of-Staff, Gen. Rafael Eitan in 1983, speaking at an Israeli parliament’s committee.  

From global broiling to plagues to wars at Ukraine and the Middle East to mass expulsions/ Exoduses of civilians from Gaza and Nagorno Karabakh to the homeless epidemic to the rising scourge of domestic fascism and beyond, our beleaguered planet is reaching the boiling point. What’s a human to do? Aside from a worldwide socialist revolution to bring about an international workers’ paradise, I have another suggestion (if not a solution) as to how to cope with these mounting crises: Go see/hear Gioachino Rossini’s 1816 The Barber of Seville at LA Opera.

Labels are central to the politics of media. And no label has been more powerful than “terrorist.”

 A single standard of language should accompany a consistent standard of human rights, which the world desperately needs. “If thought corrupts language,” George Orwell wrote, “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.”

 No amount of rhetoric from its defenders and apologists can change the reality that Hamas engaged in mass murder. What Hamas horrifically did to more than 1,000 Israeli civilians of all ages two weeks ago meets the dictionary definition of terrorism.