In my previous missives that mentioned the almost completely erased from public memory Libyan Arab Airlines Flight 114, I pointed to an endemic mainstream casual racist attitude towards Africans, Arabs, and Muslims in our predominantly white, English-capable, Christian (regardless of denomination) societies. We were (rightly) up in arms against the Soviets for shooting down that Korean plane, murdering 269 innocent civilians and then lying off their teeth about it. We were outraged for Kornukov's later career - his crime, which he never regretted, didn't hurt his promotion at all. We commemorated the victims in song, TV, documentary, film (through a passing reference in a movie).
But what about the Libyan plane? Oh,
that. Yeah, like we would
ever care, LOL. The attitude of the average American, Brit, German, what have you, is, whether we want to admit it or not, "it was a
Libyan Arab plane. Therefore, it was chock-full of Islamist terrorist niggers. Israel had
every reason to shoot it down." Israel's long history of atrocities towards Palestinians is well-documented, but we've been making all sorts of excuses for it. And that's because we view Palestinians as "too brown" and as being of the "wrong religion." Like it or not, our double standards prove it.
Why do you think Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Emmanuel Macron, Keir St
ürmer haven't said a word about
Israel's dirty 9-year war against the International Criminal Court? As the Guardian reports: "Another [source] said there was no hesitation internally [
i.e. among Israeli officials] over spying on the prosecutor, adding: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”"
Want more? When Israel falsely accused UNRWA of being involved with Hamas, the US, the UK, Australia, Germany, Austria and others immediately stopped their funding. And even when an investigation was carried out, proving that Israel's claims were wholly unsubstantiated (it seems that Israel
knows it doesn't ever have to prove its claims), Biden passed a law prohibiting US funding towards UNRWA until 2025! Yet, when presented with actual hard evidence of the innocence of those Israel smears, with actual hard evidence of Israel's crimes, our white powers (perhaps the plural is unnecessary here) pretend like it's not there.
That's
racism. The chronic, endemic belief that Palestinians
by definition lie about their suffering (the "Pallywood" canard that Biden so willingly parroted, falling completely in line with the GOP) is
racist. It's part of our racist and colonialist upbringing and our indoctrination that POCs and Muslims are, by definition,
evil or, at best,
inferior. How do I know? As a young adult, I managed to realise and admit I was
raised this way: in Greece, we were (I don't know what's happening now, as I'm 44) indoctrinated to hate the Turks and blame them for everything - and don't even get me started on the irredentist songs about Istanbul / Constantinople and crap like that. We were indoctrinated to believe that our Christian Orthodox faith is the one and only true and valid religion, that Catholics and Protestants are heretics, that Jews are inherently evil for "crucifying our Lord and Saviour," that Muslims are inherently evil for, well,
existing. We were raised on a diet of racist, sexist, misogynist, dehumanising "jokes" targeting blondes, Pontiots (Greeks of the Black Sea - these were presented as confounded morons in Greek theatre, cinema, and - later - video and TV for four decades solid), effete men, masculine women, blacks, Gypsies, LGBTQI people, people with disabilities, etc.
This indoctrination employs many tactics: from outright, explicit use of racist speech befitting a GOP or AfD candidate to weasel words as used by the likes of NYT and WaPo. This indoctrination is precisely why we're not outraged by Israel burning people alive in Rafah, but parroting its lies about "beheaded" or "baked" babies.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/may/30/biden-palestinian-beheaded-israeli-babies
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