by Christopher Horner
Appearances can change. This can be because the thing you are viewing has changed, or because you have moved, so what was there anyway now looks different. In a ‘parallax shift’ an object’s position appears to change when viewed from a new vantage point. This latter is what is happening in the way ‘The West’, now looks to its own citizens. The cause is the continued refusal by political leaders to do anything to stop the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
For Western political and media elites, events in Gaza are somehow complex, and legally ambiguous, obscured by a diplomatic word-fog. Meanwhile the rest of us have clear real-time images on our screens of what is happening there: mass murder. You can’t miss it, unless you are choosing to look away. So, look. Then turn back to the USA, UK, Germany et al. They seem complicit – because they are, and have been for a long time
The recent, very late acknowledgement by the media and political classes that something terrible is happening and that somehow Israel has some responsibility, is motivated by a desire to avoid looking responsible for what is now unfolding. Their chatter about this is the grotesque soundtrack to what is beamed live into our mobile phones and homes: genocide, now in the form of planned starvation of a civilian population. It can’t be just shrugged off as the news cycle moves on. Read more »
Once again the world faces death and destruction, and once again it asks questions. The horrific assaults by Hamas on October 7 last year and the widespread bombing by the Israeli government in Gaza raise old questions of morality, law, history and national identity. We have been here before, and if history is any sad reminder, we will undoubtedly be here again. That is all the more reason to grapple with these questions.
In November 2023, in an essay for the German national newspaper die taz, I wrote that Germany’s Jews were once again afraid for their lives. It was—and is—a shameful state of affairs, considering that the country has invested heavily in coming to terms with its fascist past and has made anti-antisemitism and the unconditional support of Israel part of its “Staatsräson,” or national interest—or, as others have come to define it, the reason for the country’s very existence. The Jews I’m referring to here, however, were not reacting to a widely deplored lack of empathy following the brutal attacks of October 7. In an open letter initiated by award-winning American journalist Ben Mauk and others, more than 100 Jewish writers, journalists, scientists, and artists living in Germany described a political climate where any form of compassion with Palestinian civilians was (and continues to be) equated with support for Hamas and criminalized. Assaults on the democratic right to dissent in peaceful demonstrations; cancellations of publications, fellowships, professorships, and awards; police brutality against the country’s immigrant population, liberal-minded Jews, and other protesting citizens—the effects have been widely documented, but what matters most now is now: the fact that the German press is still, four months later, nearly monovocal in its support of Israel and that over 28,000 civilians, two-thirds of them women and children, have died. 