Saturday, January 6, 2024

Trudeau's Tightrope

 


This article: "Justin Trudeau struggles to walk a very fine line on the Israel-Hamas war" is apparently from November 18th, 2023, but I first saw it when it was offered for my edification by my browser homepage about a week ago.  Here's the subtitle:

PM caught between asserting Israel's right to self-defence and reflecting Canadians' grief and fear

Already we've gone off the rails.  Israel is conducting offensive operations.  Israel has ALWAYS been the offender.  Israel has been abusing the Palestinians and stealing their land for DECADES.  For longer than the USA occupied Afghanistan!

The war between Israel and Hamas creates two challenges for Justin Trudeau, as it would for any Canadian prime minister.

First, he must try to take and hold a principled position on a dire conflict. Second, he must try to hold together a country whose citizens are understandably agonized by the death and destruction.

The strain of both those tasks only becomes more apparent with each passing day. Within 24 hours of Trudeau's remarks on the conflict Tuesday, Trudeau was heckled by pro-Palestinian protesters inside a Vancouver restaurant for what he didn't say — and scolded online by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for what he did say.

Any likely Canadian prime minister would indeed find it a challenge to straddle the clear, moral position on Israeli atrocities against Palestinians and the craven, debased political position of the leader of a US colony that is also in thrall to domestic Zionists.  I daresay it's impossible.

It doesn't help that an entity like Justin Trudeau (never the sharpest tool in the shed in any case) lives inside an ideological bubble, like all cowardly Liberals/liberals, who vaguely sense that their smug, shit-headed worldview can't survive contact with reality.

For these dullards there is always this compulsion to find the "middle-ground" between the views of sane, informed people and ignorant, racist, stupid, lying, bloodthirsty shit-heads.  The case of the pro-Palestinian protesters and a corrupt, murderous, war criminal, racist pile of garbage like Netanyahu coming at Trudeau from different directions is the perfect illustration of this self-created "dilemma."

Trudeau's five-minute statement on Tuesday — delivered in the middle of an announcement of federal support for a new battery facility in British Columbia — began with comments and arguments he has offered before. The "human tragedy" unfolding in the Gaza Strip is "heart wrenching," he said, and the "price of justice cannot be the continued suffering of all Palestinian civilians."

Trudeau's statement was stupid in that somehow or other "justice" is something that needs to be found for the Hamas operation on October 7th.  The world did not pop into existence on October 7th.  Ask yourself why the Hamas attack on October 7th isn't presented as "Palestinians defending themselves" and why "justice" for the Palestinians needn't require ending the lives of TENS OF THOUSANDS of innocent Israeli civilians.

Any so-called "journalist" who writes as if history started on October 7th, 2023, is a fraud.  Any so-called "journalist" who writes as if Hamas is responsible for all the Israelis killed on October 7th, when it is well known that many of them were killed by the IDF, is a fraud.  These so-called "journalists" need to be told that nobody put a gun to their head and forced them to lie for a living.  Their "services" are no longer required since they're either frauds or incompetent.


Here's Caitlin Johnstone again: "It's Insane That Anyone Is Still Supporting Israel":

It honestly blows my mind that there are still people adamantly supporting Israel after all this. After all the people they’ve killed. After all the lies they’ve been caught in. After all their comments endorsing genocide and ethnic cleansing, and all their actions showing they mean it. 

If you’re still supporting Israel at this point, you’re just telling everyone you don’t care about truth or morality. You’re announcing to the world that you care only about your weird ideological agendas and geopolitical control. 

You are publicly proclaiming that you are a dogshit human being. That you have lived on this earth all these years without arriving at any level of emotional or psychological maturity. That you have wasted your life on this planet.

6 comments:

zoombats said...

Well it is an hypocritical world we live in and I have been waiting for JT to "grow a pair"but I am sure we will be waiting a long time.I have to agree with Johnstone's comment regarding the insanity of those who stand "unequivocally" with Israel in their posts and then post videos of dogs and cats doing stupid things. Truly insane what.

thwap said...

zoombats,

I made the mistake of watching a "YouTube Short" of cheese-brain Marco Rubio "destroying" some pro-Palestinian protesters. (He did nothing of the sort. He just confidently blamed Hamas for everything and said he wanted Israel to triumph. Then, I suppose, he went to his office and got down on his knees and allowed an official from the Israeli Embassy to shart in his face.)

Anyway, I went to the channel of the cretin behind that video and saw that, among other things, there's tons of videos of IDF idiots rescuing stray dogs they find in Gaza.

"Awwwww!"

Fucking tools.

Purple library guy said...

I find it annoying that they frame it as a "war" in the first place. It's not a war. A war is a thing that happens between countries, where one invades the other or they both decide to attack pretty much simultaneously or something. Russia/Ukraine is a war (no matter how much Russia calls it a "special military operation"). This is an occupied population resisting the occupation, and the occupier reacting by busting all kinds of Geneva conventions.

The fact that some things some of the people resisting occupation do are things I don't like is (a) inevitable, and (b) does not change the fact that resisting occupation is what it is. Calling it a "war" between "Israel and Hamas" is a frame designed to misrepresent the situation as some kind of equals fighting, so as to legitimize Israel bombing everything in sight.

thwap said...

Purple Library Guy,

True. It's also a strange "war" in which one side (Hamas) only engages in acts of terrorism, while the other side (Israel) only ever operates defensively.

No matter how many Palestinian civilians they murder.

Cap said...

"PM caught between asserting Israel's right to self-defence and reflecting Canadians' grief and fear" - this is the usual mendatious media framing.
In the 2004 case about the wall Israel was building around Gaza, the ICJ found Israel's argument that it was acting in self-defense to be baseless. The self-defense provisions of art. 51 of the UN Charter apply to other state parties. However, Gaza is not a state party, but a territory under Israel's occupation. Trudeau and other Canadian politicians continuing to spout the nonsense of "Israel's right to self-defense" regarding Gaza is shameful.

thwap said...

Cap,

Our leadership and our "respectable" media are, again, showing us exactly who they are. They don't care about democracy. They don't care about justice. They don't care about the rule of law. They're even fine with GENOCIDE.

The CBC was recently exposed when they tried to rationalize their different ways of describing violence if the perpetrators were Hamas or Israel:

Canadian online outlet The Breach has published a letter by CBC’s senior manager of journalistic standards Nancy Waugh which highlights perfectly the bizarre psychological relationship that westerners have with bombs and airstrikes in foreign countries.

In response to multiple complaints from a retired Humber College professor about the wildly biased language that Canada’s state broadcaster has been using to describe Israel’s war on Gaza, Waugh acknowledged that the CBC routinely uses words like “murderous,” “vicious,” “brutal,” “massacre,” and “slaughter” to refer to the October 7 Hamas attack while using far less emotionally charged words like “intensive,” “unrelenting,” and “punishing” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza over the last three months.

Waugh defended this extreme discrepancy by saying that Israel’s attacks in Gaza differ from the Hamas attack on Israelis in that Israel’s killings are done “remotely”.

“Different words are used because although both result in death and injury, the events they describe are very different,” Waugh wrote. “The raid saw Hamas gunmen stream through the border fence and attack Israelis directly with firearms, knives and explosives. Gunmen chased down festival goers, assaulted kibbutzniks then shot them, fought hand to hand, and threw grenades. The attack was brutal, often vicious, and certainly murderous.”

“Bombs dropped from thousands of feet and artillery shells lofted into Gaza from kilometers away result in death and destruction on a massive scale, but it is carried out remotely,” Waugh continued. “The deadly results are unseen by those who caused them and the source unseen by those [who] suffer and die.”


Here's the url in case my html didn't work:

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/01/09/westerners-have-an-absolutely-psychotic-view-of-airstrikes/