Farah El-Sharif examines the forces that lead Muslim leaders to stand by and witness the slaughter of their own people in exchange for “petty crumbs” from Western powers and the Zionist state.
Thank you, Chris and Farah! All of humanity needs to figure out that they're on the wrong bus, get off at the next stop, and take an entirely different route, instead of this one, heading for the cliff.
Would it have been better or more sane for Muslims to have been supportive of Cheney/Bush, or more hopeful with Obama, never really and fully held accountable for the carnage he caused in Syria and Libya, or a Biden who never said no to weapons needed in the slaughter of Palestinians?. I certainly think Trump's proposal is absurd, and don't trust him on this issue at all, but to equate him with Hitler and not a mention the others who took us through a 21st century of wars is no more then a reflection of Hedges profound Trump hate, and maybe he needs to be more careful about his comments in that regard, since those kinds of statements let the other's off the hook. During the anti-war movement, short lived and weak, I watched people who were very vocal in their contempt for Bush/Cheney go silent with Obama which helped weaken the whole movement. That's all that we need at this point is a scapegoat to understand the whole point of this interview.
I am fully aware of his criticism of Obama and Biden in the past, but Trump unlike both of them didn't go around bombing Muslim countries, killing and displacing millions, and turning their countries into hell holes where their misery continues. I don't trust Trump and his absurd agenda for the Palestinians, and his ass kissing a war criminal like Netanyahu, and things might indeed get worse , but to single him out and identify him as a Hitler while no other US president was condemned in this interview reflects his profound hatred of this man which puts his objectivity into question. His statement also became a source of distraction from her basic thesis about the Muslim world and their complicity in regard to the non-Muslim, non Arab world and their agenda.
Why the Palestinians are not receiving support of any kind from the Muslim majority countries has been a vexing question for a long time. Besides an expression of meek opposition to the slaughter, countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Malaysia, Indonesia etc have done very little to provide succour to the plight of the Palestinians. Thank you Farah and Chris for your enlightening report.
Please allow me to articulate my thoughts which should be interpreted as supplementary to your discussion.
Although I grasp the American led agenda of emasculation of Islam with a concomitant neutering of Muslim identity, the predominant pretext for the onslaught, in my opinion, is capitalist imperialism. Just as colonialism then has had an agenda to reduce the “native” to something in an early stage of human development, so colonialism is reducing the Palestinian to a subhuman. Perhaps it’s easier for the ordinary western person to imagine a Muslim subhuman which makes the slaughter more palatable than a Christian subhuman. I don’t imagine that the Jew and the western elite had religious convictions in mind as a primary factor when it decided on this course of action though. The fact that Palestinians are non-white (and Muslim) ticked a box for them however. Chris pointed out in a recent article that genocide or mass murder has befallen many non-white peoples over the centuries. This almost makes the mass slaughter of the Ashkenazi Jews a historical aberration.
Trump’s salivation over the lucrative prospects of a reimagined Gaza is instructive. In its death spiral, vulgar capitalism is grasping at anything to provide it with new impetus. It is Palestine, Congo and every non-white country with profitable potential today. Which Black Country’s turn will it be tomorrow?
Don't imagine your imperialists intend to limit themselves to countries of colour. I don't think they see colour, though they may use it. They're after Canada as well......we still have the remnants of a civilization.......and land...and resoures....to plunder.
They'd make Americans of us.....imperialists imagining that our skin colour protects us...let's us join the usurpers....live a while longer the superficial 'good life'.
The forces moving to rule over everything just now are Mammon worshippers.....the oldest of idolators.....they worship Mammon....the golden calf.
And it's getting harder for them to keep that gravy train running......they need to own, and make sacrifice zones....of everything and everyone.
Rooting their disease out of our own bodies and brains is the hardest part of the task before us. We need to discover as many ways as possible to stand together....and I don't think its' going to be easy....but it is what we have to attempt to do.
You could argue the US has been a sacrifice zone since after the Second World War.
Look how you don’t have universal health care, how you don’t have wages that you can live on plus leave entitlements.
The smashing of unions is sacrificing of the common man and woman in the US very seriously since the 1970s. And it continues to this very day.
The original Americans call it Wetiko, the spirit of cannibalism that pervades us whites to kill and consume each other and planet endlessly to our ultimate ruin. Greed, domination, power and money have no end, there is always more.
We are doing a damn fine job of it with our corporate driven changed climate.
If we don’t see our madness for what it is we won’t change.
Absolutely...and it is dreadfully hard for white privileged people to wake up and not just smell the coffee.....get a whiff of their own sh**t.
No matter how many wars we lose, we continue to think that we've got the skinny on how everything should be run.........and when kids starve...in Iraq or Cuba...we think, like Madelaine F...ing Albright.......that its 'worth it'.
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Rafah El-Sharif for the insights given here.
Of greatest value in term of gaining perspective and also the most affecting for me was the understanding of the toll on the views of Muslims collectively, on their view of themselves, their heritage, their beliefs and the resultant betrayal of their greater family. All in this time of being subjected to what is essentially a racial and religious war being waged on them, and all of this a part of the colonial history (ongoing).
The greatest dilemma, in essence, being in terms of the spirit of the people.
The points of hope: the ability to somehow break out of this, most notably illustrated by the Gazans, as being in some sense the freest of the Muslim world, for they have escaped the mental prison, that trap of fear, of decimated consciousness.
...
The Egyptian cab driver, thank you especially for that. The light of humanity.
I am having a problem with being blocked from Scheer Post and from Consortium News,( 2 places where Chris publishes work), but I am pretty sure it is not by their staff or because of editorial policy. I am generally never insulting in any disagreement I have and I am a longtime monthly contributor. I have not been able to post any comment , no matter how supportive of the particular article, on either site for close to a month from my laptop.
I did go to a nearby library and post 2 comments under a different name and they were entered in the comments a few hours later. This felt like a confirmation that something was up. I wrote to both sites asking for an explanation but without response. I have the feeling ( unprovable but hard to explain the lack of response) that my web form message to the site managers never got to them. When I post a comment it appears with the "waiting for approval" orange subheading, but is never approved and disappears after leaving and returning.
For this to happen the only explanation I can come up with is that I am being routed to a false version of the site which is really a dead end. This seems as if it would be a hell of an effort to block one person unless it was part of a test for a larger project.
Any thoughts or advice on this issue would be appreciated as would someone who could forward this comment to Scheer Post and Consortium news. I also emailed to Chris but he is a busy person.
Thank you, Chris and Farah! All of humanity needs to figure out that they're on the wrong bus, get off at the next stop, and take an entirely different route, instead of this one, heading for the cliff.
Would it have been better or more sane for Muslims to have been supportive of Cheney/Bush, or more hopeful with Obama, never really and fully held accountable for the carnage he caused in Syria and Libya, or a Biden who never said no to weapons needed in the slaughter of Palestinians?. I certainly think Trump's proposal is absurd, and don't trust him on this issue at all, but to equate him with Hitler and not a mention the others who took us through a 21st century of wars is no more then a reflection of Hedges profound Trump hate, and maybe he needs to be more careful about his comments in that regard, since those kinds of statements let the other's off the hook. During the anti-war movement, short lived and weak, I watched people who were very vocal in their contempt for Bush/Cheney go silent with Obama which helped weaken the whole movement. That's all that we need at this point is a scapegoat to understand the whole point of this interview.
CH has been highly critical of Obama, Biden etc. See his recent excellent interview on Al Jazeera reproduced on his Substack.
I am fully aware of his criticism of Obama and Biden in the past, but Trump unlike both of them didn't go around bombing Muslim countries, killing and displacing millions, and turning their countries into hell holes where their misery continues. I don't trust Trump and his absurd agenda for the Palestinians, and his ass kissing a war criminal like Netanyahu, and things might indeed get worse , but to single him out and identify him as a Hitler while no other US president was condemned in this interview reflects his profound hatred of this man which puts his objectivity into question. His statement also became a source of distraction from her basic thesis about the Muslim world and their complicity in regard to the non-Muslim, non Arab world and their agenda.
Why the Palestinians are not receiving support of any kind from the Muslim majority countries has been a vexing question for a long time. Besides an expression of meek opposition to the slaughter, countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Malaysia, Indonesia etc have done very little to provide succour to the plight of the Palestinians. Thank you Farah and Chris for your enlightening report.
Please allow me to articulate my thoughts which should be interpreted as supplementary to your discussion.
Although I grasp the American led agenda of emasculation of Islam with a concomitant neutering of Muslim identity, the predominant pretext for the onslaught, in my opinion, is capitalist imperialism. Just as colonialism then has had an agenda to reduce the “native” to something in an early stage of human development, so colonialism is reducing the Palestinian to a subhuman. Perhaps it’s easier for the ordinary western person to imagine a Muslim subhuman which makes the slaughter more palatable than a Christian subhuman. I don’t imagine that the Jew and the western elite had religious convictions in mind as a primary factor when it decided on this course of action though. The fact that Palestinians are non-white (and Muslim) ticked a box for them however. Chris pointed out in a recent article that genocide or mass murder has befallen many non-white peoples over the centuries. This almost makes the mass slaughter of the Ashkenazi Jews a historical aberration.
Trump’s salivation over the lucrative prospects of a reimagined Gaza is instructive. In its death spiral, vulgar capitalism is grasping at anything to provide it with new impetus. It is Palestine, Congo and every non-white country with profitable potential today. Which Black Country’s turn will it be tomorrow?
Don't imagine your imperialists intend to limit themselves to countries of colour. I don't think they see colour, though they may use it. They're after Canada as well......we still have the remnants of a civilization.......and land...and resoures....to plunder.
They'd make Americans of us.....imperialists imagining that our skin colour protects us...let's us join the usurpers....live a while longer the superficial 'good life'.
The forces moving to rule over everything just now are Mammon worshippers.....the oldest of idolators.....they worship Mammon....the golden calf.
And it's getting harder for them to keep that gravy train running......they need to own, and make sacrifice zones....of everything and everyone.
Rooting their disease out of our own bodies and brains is the hardest part of the task before us. We need to discover as many ways as possible to stand together....and I don't think its' going to be easy....but it is what we have to attempt to do.
You could argue the US has been a sacrifice zone since after the Second World War.
Look how you don’t have universal health care, how you don’t have wages that you can live on plus leave entitlements.
The smashing of unions is sacrificing of the common man and woman in the US very seriously since the 1970s. And it continues to this very day.
The original Americans call it Wetiko, the spirit of cannibalism that pervades us whites to kill and consume each other and planet endlessly to our ultimate ruin. Greed, domination, power and money have no end, there is always more.
We are doing a damn fine job of it with our corporate driven changed climate.
If we don’t see our madness for what it is we won’t change.
Absolutely...and it is dreadfully hard for white privileged people to wake up and not just smell the coffee.....get a whiff of their own sh**t.
No matter how many wars we lose, we continue to think that we've got the skinny on how everything should be run.........and when kids starve...in Iraq or Cuba...we think, like Madelaine F...ing Albright.......that its 'worth it'.
Brilliant 👏
Wow, Farah El-Sharif, extraordinary insight into so many of our individual and collective dysfunctions.
The rot.
The genocidal blood lust.
The decay and failure of our moral and ethical outlook and behaviour.
The normalising of genocide.
Thanks again Chris, keep up the excellent work.
Thank you to Chris Hedges and Rafah El-Sharif for the insights given here.
Of greatest value in term of gaining perspective and also the most affecting for me was the understanding of the toll on the views of Muslims collectively, on their view of themselves, their heritage, their beliefs and the resultant betrayal of their greater family. All in this time of being subjected to what is essentially a racial and religious war being waged on them, and all of this a part of the colonial history (ongoing).
The greatest dilemma, in essence, being in terms of the spirit of the people.
The points of hope: the ability to somehow break out of this, most notably illustrated by the Gazans, as being in some sense the freest of the Muslim world, for they have escaped the mental prison, that trap of fear, of decimated consciousness.
...
The Egyptian cab driver, thank you especially for that. The light of humanity.
Help I don't know where to turn.
I am having a problem with being blocked from Scheer Post and from Consortium News,( 2 places where Chris publishes work), but I am pretty sure it is not by their staff or because of editorial policy. I am generally never insulting in any disagreement I have and I am a longtime monthly contributor. I have not been able to post any comment , no matter how supportive of the particular article, on either site for close to a month from my laptop.
I did go to a nearby library and post 2 comments under a different name and they were entered in the comments a few hours later. This felt like a confirmation that something was up. I wrote to both sites asking for an explanation but without response. I have the feeling ( unprovable but hard to explain the lack of response) that my web form message to the site managers never got to them. When I post a comment it appears with the "waiting for approval" orange subheading, but is never approved and disappears after leaving and returning.
For this to happen the only explanation I can come up with is that I am being routed to a false version of the site which is really a dead end. This seems as if it would be a hell of an effort to block one person unless it was part of a test for a larger project.
Any thoughts or advice on this issue would be appreciated as would someone who could forward this comment to Scheer Post and Consortium news. I also emailed to Chris but he is a busy person.