“Ben Gvir has faced criminal charges of hate speech against Arabs and was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli-American mass murderer and Jewish extremist Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. He removed the portrait after he entered politics.[4]”
My career as a satirist is over before it began
I think a fair number of westerners who parrot “Israel has a right to defend itself” have genuinely fallen for deliberate propaganda and are rather not innately stupid or genocidal or whatever. For example, how many such people would actually know about these two monsters? I think most Americans who distrust their government think of politicians as at worst white collar criminals while these two monsters are literal violent extremists holding important offices in the government.
To your main point: I agree most people (outside of the government of course) don’t know what Israel has been doing to Gaza. Even for those who do seek out political info, if they stay within western media sphere (which conveniently tells Americans that all non-western media is state propaganda and can’t be trusted), they’ll never see the true story. Only glimpses of it at best but always colored in “both sides” framing and undertones of “but if you believe Israel is violating the law daily since 1967, you must just hate Jews!” That last part is enough to make any decent human who lacks any further knowledge immediately go “oh, I don’t hate Jews. I must have been wrong thinking Israel was doing bad stuff.” It takes a lot of learning before you can totally untwist all the lies upon lies that Israel, the media, and pro-Zionist groups have been spreading for decades all while dodging the legitimate antisemitic Nazi landmines that right wingers are constantly planting. Israel and figures like Bibi specifically have 100% purposely been saying and taking actions to drive ignorant people towards being antisemitic even if they don’t know it consciously (the people, not Bibi) (like Israel calling itself a Jewish state that represents all Jews while perpetrating a genocide)
I would add though that even if people did know more, an not insignificant amount of Americans, I wanna estimate like 25%ish, literally do not care about the suffering no matter how much they see and know. They actively cheer on murder because either they’re sadistic or (more common, I think) they’re deluded into thinking this somehow will benefit them. Or they think of it like people passing a police stop on the highway. Like Israel/US are the cops upholding some sort of law and order and arresting/punishing “bad people.” Yes, of course that’s moronic, but again a not insignificant amount of Americans are totally ok with the US being world police.
As for the example portion, I see your point in how exceptionally bad these two are and I agree totally they should be… kindly visited by drones immediately. But I also don’t draw any real distinction between direct cheerleaders of violence like Ben-Givr and indirect agents of evil like a Biden or Hillary type. They’ve both had their moments, but you’re not gonna catch them now days out there saying they support a gunman mowing down dozens of Muslims mid-prayer. But it’s purely an optics thing because based on quotes from Biden and Hillary (just choosing them but you can insert most senior US politicians) they would also love to have displays of affection for right wing pieces of shit. But that would look bad. So for the same reason Ben-Givr took down the picture once he decided to enter politics (bad optics), lifelong pieces of shit knew to never put up such portraits to begin with. So in the end “We came, we saw, he dies cackling” Hillary is the same person as Ben-Givr. I think a lot of focus has to be placed on this point of decoupling this idea that the orchestrators of violence are somehow clean and respectable while the hands-on guys or direct cheerleaders are dirty. Everyone understands how the mafia works and knows that a Don is culpable for every crime committed in his org. It’s weird that people give a pass to CEOs or politicians (but only western-allied politicians). (Also this isn’t a criticism of you, more of westerners broadly who allow atrocities to continue because they lull themselves with these coping mechanisms to avoid reality that their own leaders are fucking demons)
I was reading with all my wish to find out the truth about “both sides” for 4 years until I saw Al Jazeera and saw there’s no fucking “both sides” to apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide.
That’s why Israel wants to block Al Jazeera
Ben-Gvir’s arab racism is really funny considering himself is an arab with an Iraqi dad and a Kurdish mother
When he came of age for conscription into the Israel Defense Forces at 18, he was exempted from service by the IDF due to his extreme-right political background.> How is political leaning an exemption FFS? So he’s happy for others to oppress Palestinians, but won’t get his hands dirty. Rules for thee, but not for me?
