Silence is Compliance
Spiritual types were the first to object to Covid masks as muzzles, yet they are muzzled about genocide in Gaza.
I wrote my earlier piece, The Spiritual Response, after a discussion about whether taking up arms—the keyboard—online is an appropriate or useful response to what is happening in Gaza. I find myself oscillating between resignation and the urge to respond.
Having sat with these waves for the last month, I want to explore saying something and keeping silent. That I write this article should give you an idea of my position.
The internet is buzzing with articles slicing and dicing events in Gaza. The problem of Israel—it has been a problem since its inception—is for some very simple. Put aside all religious pretext and confront the images on your screen of the results of dropping bombs on a civilian population. Not a few bombs, but a vast tonnage of bombs, dropped on houses, apartment blocks, hospitals and ambulances. The bombing is not indiscriminate. It has the deliberation of psychopathy behind it.
The delusion that world leaders—with a few notable exceptions—would have us swallow is that a ceasefire—stopping the dropping of bombs on civilians—will lead to violence. Surprisingly, no mental gymnastics are required to follow this strange equation. You simply have to accept that Hamas are terrorists, therefore the rulebook must be torn up.
Often reffering to Roman or Greek texts, are those who advocate a ‘been round the block a few times kid’ philosophy that holds that peace is not possible without war, without violence, without dropping bombs on children.
I say to these people, go there, to Gaza. Stand in the midst of the aftermath, the broken bodies, the pools of blood, the survivors scrabbling at rubble for the hand of a mother, father, sister, brother. Be there five minutes and tell us about war.
If there was once hope of a peaceful resolution to Palestine-Israel, it ended with the assassination of Yitzak Rabin by Zionist terrorists in 1995. A few days before Rabin was blown up by a car bomb, Netanyahu attended a right-wing demonstration that denounced Rabin as a traitor and staged a mock funeral for him.
Netanyahu has made his intentions clear. In the UN general assembly of 22 September he held up a map of Israel in which there were no Palestinian territories at all, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Citing Biblical passages in almost every speech to the Israeli press, Netanyahu is reaping the rewards of his investment in Hamas, and invoking the spectres of paranoid psychosis in justifying the targeting of schools, hospitals, fire engines and ambulances.
He has crushed popular dissent and recourse to the judiciary through cancelation, intimidation and manipulation. He has been given license for this by his Western sponsors, who employ the same methods. Five days ago, 400 Jews who sat down in New York’s Central Station to peacefully protest against Israeli’s bombing of civilians and call for an immediate ceasefire, were arrested by NYPD.
If policing at protests in the UK has been heavy-handed, rhetoric from UK Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, whose career dream is to see planes rendering UK migrants to Rwanda, is beyond belief. She called the 500,000-strong march in London a week ago, “a hate march.”
This follows logically and plainly from the cancellation and ongoing harassment of Jeremy Corbyn. A man who wanted to take the UK into a new era of dearmament and dialogue, with a manifesto fit for Aquarian times, for the many not the few, was dismissed as a terrorist. He is hounded every day by Murdoch press thugs asking if he will condemn Hamas.
According to the Israel Defence Force, there are no civilians. All Palestinians are Hamas. Terrorists sequester themselves in schools, orphanages, ambulances and hospitals. Israel cannot be blamed for bombing them. It has the right to defend itself.
This, as I have explained elsewhere in this Substack, develops strategies from the 9/11 playbook. Al Qaeda was the bogeyman, whose existence justified a vast litany of crimes against humanity. Now it is Hamas.
Muslims across the world are angry. Like Judaism and Christianity, Islam is socialist. If the Abrahamic religions struggle to adapt to Aquarian issues like LGBTQ rights, they also hold values that should not be adapted. They call for kindness, fairness, mercy and compassion, particularly towards the poor and downtrodden.
Thanks to its political, economic and historical relationship with the US, UK and EU, Israel operates world class army, airforce, navy and cyber warfare units. Israel has deployed its formidable armouries many times in offensives against Gaza, Lebanon and Syria. Behind Hamas is the real bogeyman, Iran.
The Palestinians have nothing. They have had nothing since the British reassigned their land to Jews in the Balfour Declaration.
The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by the British government in 1917 during the First World War announcing its support for the establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small minority Jewish population. The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917. [Wikipedia]
The letter opened:
In Palestine we do not propose even to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants of the country... The Four Great Powers are committed to Zionism. And Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long traditions, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land. Arthur Balfour, 1919
A short film on the legacy of the Balfour Declaration can be seen here. In summary, it paved the way for he Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948, in which thousands of Palestinians were butchered in their homes, shocking the rest of the population into panic.
The most infamous event of the Nakba is the terrorist attack on Deir Yassin, a Palestinian village near Jerusalem.
The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 130[1] fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, in Deir Yassin, a village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem, despite having earlier agreed to a peace pact. The massacre occurred while Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.[4]
The village put up stiffer resistance than the Jewish militias had expected and they suffered casualties, but it fell after house-to-house fighting. Some of the Palestinian Arab villagers were killed in the course of the battle, while others were massacred by the Jewish militias while trying to flee or surrender. A number of Palestinian Arab prisoners were executed, some after being paraded in West Jerusalem, where they were jeered, spat at, stoned, looted, and eventually murdered.[1][5][6] In addition to the killing and widespread looting, there may have been cases of mutilation and rape.[7] [Wikipedia]
Readers wishing to familiarise themselves with the history should read Avi Shaim, Ilan Pappe and Norman Finkelstein. As a coda, a number of Jewish luminaries signed an open letter to the New York Times in 1948. Among them was Albert Einstein.
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the "Freedom Party" (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
About Deir Yassin, the letter comments:
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9 (THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants240 men, women, and childrenand kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin.
I hope the reader is able to view the claim to Israel as the holy land granted Jews in the Old Testament against this smattering of 20th Century facts.
As UN Secretary General, Antonio Gutierres, said in response to the October 7 Hamas attack: “Hamas did not arise in a vacuum.” For this simple reference to historical fact, Israel denounced him as an anti-semite, and later the UN as having “not one ounce of credibility.”
Ironically, he is right. There are over 100 United Nations Sanctions and Declarations against Israel’s illegal occupation of territories it was never granted under Balfour, and the violence with which that occupation has been persued, regardless of those sanctions.
Imagine being Palestinian for a moment. The 20th Century began with a holocaust. Because that holocaust came after the Jewish holocaust, which wnet down in the history books as The Holocaust, most Westerners don’t know anything about it. It has taken Jewish and Palestinian writers, journalists, historians, artists, filmmakers and musicians decades to rectify that.
Under occupation, your history is one of resistance. Anyone and everyone who has been to the Occupied Territories has been moved to say something about it. From the late Reverend Desmond Tutu and Roger Waters to apologists like Naomi Wolfe here on Substack, it has not possible to say nothing about the visit. in 2014, Tutu was moved to write an open letter in the Israel leftist paper Haaretz. He writes:
A quarter of a century ago, I participated in some well-attended demonstrations against apartheid. I never imagined we’d see demonstrations of that size again, but last Saturday’s turnout in Cape Town was as big if not bigger. Participants included young and old, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, agnostics, atheists, blacks, whites, reds and greens ... as one would expect from a vibrant, tolerant, multicultural nation.
I asked the crowd to chant with me: “We are opposed to the injustice of the illegal occupation of Palestine. We are opposed to the indiscriminate killing in Gaza. We are opposed to the indignity meted out to Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks. We are opposed to violence perpetrated by all parties. But we are not opposed to Jews.”
Tutu was slammed as “the most influential antisemite of all time” by Zionist spokesperson Alan Dershowitz, who was once Jeffrey Epstein’s mentor.
So if you’re Palestinian, have lived under increasingly brutal apartheid occupation since 1948, have no freedom, future or recourse to justice, what would you do? Just go somewhere else, you might think. Except you can’t. To visit your uncle a few blocks away requires running the gauntlet of IDF patrols and checkpoints. Being a minor is no defence. It just means you’re even more vulnerable.
Ramallah, 10 July – Palestinian children in the Israel military detention system face physical and emotional abuse, with four out of five (86%) of them being beaten, and 69% strip-searched, according to new research by Save the Children. Nearly half (42%) are injured at the point of arrest, including gunshot wounds and broken bones. Some report violence of a sexual nature and some are transferred to court or between detention centres in small cages.
Save the Children and a partner organisation consulted 228 former child detainees from across the West Bank, detained from between one and 18 months, and found that most children are beaten, handcuffed and blindfolded during arrest. They are also interrogated at unknown locations without the presence of a caregiver, and are often deprived of food, water and sleep, or access to legal counsel, according to the research. The main alleged crime for these detentions is stone throwing, which can carry a 20-year sentence in prison for Palestinian children.
The new research follows Save the Children’s 2020 report “Defenceless” and finds that the impact of physical and emotional abuse during detention has soared, with profound consequences on children’s ability to recover.
This is you, there in Gaza. This is the minimum story of everyone you know. This is Normal. Your people do their best to organise themselves, to protest to the world, to engage the other side in a Peace Process brokered by America, whose partisanship has been obvious from the outset. According to Joe Biden, Israel and Ukraine are “our greatest investments.”
It gets boring being a psychopath. Especially when you’re getting away with it. After a while, you want some heat. You can’t believe how stupid people are. Biden and Netanyahu have given the game away over and over on live TV. Just like Jimmy Savile told British audiences on live TV: “I’m a monster.”
You’re Palestinian. In Gaza. The shack you lived in is now rubble, beneath which is the body, maybe still breathing, of your child, your mother, your father. What do you do?
But maybe our thought experiment is flawed. It’s not possible to imagine what it’s like being Palestinian, let alone in Gaza. Let’s simplify things.
You’re you, wherever you live.One day, you see a man violently abusing a child. Do you say something? Or do you keep silent?
Say you say something. The man reproaches you with Fuck off and mind your business, or Do you want some? Now what? Do you comply? Maybe you don’t fancy you’re chances and anyway you’re late for work/dinner/meeting friends.
But the next day you see the same thing. Another man abusing another child. From across the road, phone in hand, you demand to know what’s going on. This child was throwing stones, says the man. Why were you throwing stones, you call out to the child. This man stole our house, says the child.
Nonsense, says the man, I was here 2000 years ago. It says so in the Bible. And anyway, if I don’t take your house, someone else will. So it may as well be me? Do you have a problem with that? Are you against God? You take a photo on your phone and send it to a relevant social service. Nothing happens.
Speak Up or Keep Schtum?
I wrote previously:
A number of contacts have messaged me about a different response. In short, it’s about holding one’s balance, holding one’s peace, and generally not engaging with the 3D shitstorm. It’s about avoiding that heaviness and foreboding.
Some refer to the thousands of photons the human heart emits when it sends love, compared to the negative trickle when it is in fear or loathing. Others to their right to preserve their balance, avoid heaviness and foreboding and turn away, switch off social media and do something else. [The Spiritual Response]
Most people, including those in spiritual circles, including those who have drunk shamanic medicines with indigenous peoples whose much maligned rights they rightly defend on social media, remain silent on Palestine-Israel. They remain silent about genocide. They remain silent about dropping bombs on children, even after the world has called for a ceasefire. Why is this?
1. Fear of being labelled antisemitic
This is perhaps the most valid fear. I am watching digital platforms one by one flashing up alerts to updates to their legal terms and conditions. What has changed? The abuse section. For example, Chess.com reserve the right, at their sole discretion, to suspend your account, if they, at their sole discretion, deem you to have behaved abusively. No doubt there is abusive in-game chat on Chess.com but “their sole discretion” makes me uneasy.
We are already in a place where the Palestinian flag has been rewritten as an emblem of hate. If you object to dropping bombs on children, you hate Jews. You are an instrument of hate, and will be cancelled, like the Harvard students who signed another open letter, were doxxed and their names displayed on a billboard truck that drove around town displaying their names beneath the title “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
What did they say? That they were “staunchly opposed” to violence against civilians, and that Israel was responsible for the 7 October attacks.
The doxxing truck and distribution of personal information online was paid for and organised by Adam Guillette, president of “watchdog” Accuracy in Media. A quick look at their website reveals that their sole concern is “antisemitism.”
Who is AIM? According to Wikipedia:
Accuracy in Media (AIM) is an American non-profit conservative[1][2] news media watchdog founded in 1969 by economist Reed Irvine.
AIM supported the Vietnam War and blamed media bias for the U.S. loss in the war. During the Reagan administration, AIM criticized reporting about the El Mozote massacre in El Salvador. During the Clinton administration, AIM pushed Vince Foster conspiracy theories. During the George W. Bush administration, AIM accused the media of bias against the Iraq War, defended the Bush administration's use of torture, and campaigned to stop the United States from signing the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). It described 2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama as "the most radical candidate ever to stand at the precipice of acquiring his party's presidential nomination. It is apparent that he is a member of an international socialist movement." It also criticized the media's response to the COVID-19 pandemic.[3]
AIM, which opposes the scientific consensus on climate change, has criticized media reporting on climate change. The organization gives out the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award. Past recipients include Marc Morano (who runs the climate change denial website ClimateDepot), Tucker Carlson, and Jim Hoft Gateway Pundit).
AIM’s interest in some Harvard students criticism of Israel comes from an acutely right wing stance. I shall be exploring this in a later article. For now, let’s say: The Z word.
I believe many fear calling out Israeli crimes, given the existence of networks of “watchdogs” ready to deploy weaponised antisemitism.
Saying something is adding to the cycle of violence
Take our man in the street, abusing children. Say this man is a Zionist, who believes he has a right to do whatever he wants in his holy land, especially to wipe out terrorists who want him dead because he is a Jew, even if the “terrorist” is a child. You call him out. He calls you an antisemite. Now you and he have a problem and the child goes on being abused. Maybe more so, as the man takes out his righteous wrath on the child.
What good did saying something do? Who knows? If nothing else, it leant friction against the actions of the abuser. If there were ten people calling for him to stop, it would be ten times the friction. It is human instinct, animal instinct, to save a child or other vulnerable person or creature, from harm. Isn’t it?
It’s a mirror. Both sides are as a bad as each other.
See the micro history above and the emerging facts. If the asymmetrical armouries and numbers of fatalities don’t convince you, try the emerging accounts of what really happened on October 7. A few hundred blokes in hang gliders gave the world’s most uptight security state the slip and butchered innocent civilians inside Israel, for seven hours.
Kibbutzes were reduced to rubble. How did it happen? Did the terrorists let loose so many bullets out of sheer Jew-hating evil that the walls collapsed? Or do the tracks in the garden and the eyewitness accounts tell a different story? That IDF tanks rolled up and obeyed the Hannibal Directive: no Israeli hostages will be taken. Bomb the whole thing, captors and hostages alike.
But the Holocaust…the Jewish psyche.
This is the argument appropriated by default to “justify” Israeli war crimes, when there isn’t a curiously convenient “terrorist” attack to do the job. How many dissenting Jews, from Albert Einstein to Noam Chomsky to Naomi Wimbourne-Smith to Jewish Voice for Peace to Professor Norman Finkelstein, must call out this bullshit? Nobody calls it better than Finkelstein in his legendary “crocodile tears” speech. Please note, the student is in fact German, not Jewish.
We’re praying for peace or sending love via cacao and kirtan
By all means we should be praying for peace and sending the world all the positivity we can muster. But to do this in silence, or while toeing the line about the symmetrical mirror, in which both sides are as bad as each other, despite the behaviour of Israel in public at the UN, despite the references to Biblical prophecy (hotly disputed by many Jewish scholars), and despite the broken and bloodied babies in the dirt in Gaza, is to allow the perpetrator to persist in the lie repeated by the UK and US governments, that Israel has a right to defend itself, and that a ceasefire (of bombs on children) will lead to violence.
Posting on Facebook is virtue signalling
I discussed this recently on Facebook. The discussion inspired my softer piece on all this, The Spiritual Response. I tagged the person in a share on Facebook, and got positive emojis and a Friend Request, which I accepted. My silence, even in the face of surface niceness, can be taken for compliance.
So here’s my U-turn. Virtue signalling? Then step up and signal!
Not calling out the current and ongoing bombing of children, with explicit reference to Israel as perpetrator, amounts to complicity. Keeping silent, or muted, or non partisan is to be impaled on the horns of a false dilemma. There is no dilemma. Bombs are being dropped on children, hospitals, ambulances and churches, while Israeli ambassadors tell the world, “there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”
The bombing of children is a crime against humanity. Calling it out will not stop Israel bombing more children, any more than international condemnation of Tony Blair will put him behind bars where he belongs. But not calling it out gives Israel green light to proceed, like not calling out Jimmy Savile for being the monster he told us he was gave him green light to proceed.
The much circulated words of Martin Luther King nail it:
The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.
Maybe you don’t want to go on a march. Maybe you don’t want to stick your head above the parapet. Maybe you have Jewish friends you don’t want to offend. Maybe you’re Jewish. Maybe you’ve got enough on your plate with work, kids, life.
Just don’t be part of the ultimate tragedy.
Finally, what is spirituality? Any non-religious definition must surely include values like kindness and compassion.
Do you really buy the equation spouted by Biden, Sunak and Starmer? That bombing children is the only practical way to peace?
Or do you buy the justification spouted by Zionist hijackers of Judaism, and their indoctrinated Settler zombies? That Jews are entitled to take non-Jewish lives like they are entitled to slaughter animals?
The only understandable defence for keeping schtum is fear of being labelled, doxxed and targeted by Zionist trolls. Defence accepted, but then we must accept that we cowered out of it.
However complex the issue seems, keep coming back to the simple fact of the bombing of children. Gaza today. West Bank tomorrow. Maybe India the day after that. And on the Seventh Day the God of Zion looked upon the slaughter and said, “Let’s have a rest.”
Your silence will be taken as compliance.