So, late last week, I’m hearing all this bullshit bubbling in the news about Genocide Joe calling for a “pause” in the Israel-Palestine “conflict” so that the hostages can get out safely — god bless their exceptional asses — and maybe also so that any Palestinians remaining who are actually able to move can also get out, and probably end up being bombed on the highway to the refugee camps, or bombed at the camp once they get there, or both; thanks so much, Joe.

And as I was starting to work on this piece the night before the big mobilization for Palestinian solidarity here in DC this past Saturday, I was seeing a lot of chatter on the Web about how Israel should be expelled from the United Nations for this horror — an excellent idea, though they’d never get it through because Israel’s big, fat, rich asshole Uncle has veto power at the Security Council. Still, what an awesome thought — drum the bastards outta the UN.

But, aaaanyway, yeah; El Presidente wants a “pause”.

“Pause”, my goddamn ass. Time to hit “Stop” and “Eject”. Israel is the scuffy, overplayed, worn-out, hissy old British post-punk mixtape tangled up in the Earth’s 1989 cassette/CD combo boombox, and no pencil made can save it.

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The ongoing, escalating roaring of bloodthirsty racism in support of Israeli thuggery in Gaza — speaking of mass shootings — put me in mind of a book of cartoons entitled “America’s Black & White Book”, published during World War I by an artist named William Allen Rogers, in particular one of the “greatest hits” from that book, a ripe little nugget entitled “Another Case Of Wiping Hands On The American Flag”, a classic rendition of the “Filthy Dirty Huns Kill Children” genre of the WWI era. Rogers was arguably one of the most raving, drooling, jingoistic warmongering editorial cartoonists of that era — sort of a poor man’s James Montgomery Flagg — and drew for the New York Herald, arguably one of the most raving, drooling, warmongering newspapers in the US of that era.

Their presentation nowadays may be slicker, their media more sophisticated, their rhetoric a little more refined, their approach a little classier, but if you strip it to the core it’s the same old shit they’ve been serving up since the Spanish-American War, at least: filthy dirty Huns are killing babies, filthy dirty Huns are throwing babies out of incubators, dirty filthy Huns are beheading babies… you get the idea.

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In the words of the immortal John Cleese, my nipples exploded with delight to hear that Palestine was punching the bullies back, and in such spectacularly and totally boss fashion.

And in totally standard fashion, Israeli state mouthpieces are screeching about how this is their Nineleven™, how Hamas came for their babies — pretty much the usual response… never fails — when you punch the bully back, the little punk runs crying to the principal. Meanwhile, at MSNBC, some clown who sounded like he was still in college mentioned how this conflict has been going on “since time immemorial”. Shame I couldn’t pull Junior aside to remind him that the Nakba occurred in 1948, within the memories of many people still living, and that 1948 is not “time immemorial” (before I smacked the living shit out of him).

I can’t pretend I’m not enjoying this, but I don’t know which part of it I’m enjoying more — the idea that the resistance fighters would paraglide in, or watching one Western media babbler after another shitting themselves on the air over the fact that ZOMG THEY’RE USING PARAGLIDERS, THE BASTARDS.

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So, the other day I’m doomscrolling the news from Gaza, and I stumbled over this 8 year-old Truthout article that somebody dug up and tweeted. The callousness of Washington foreign-policy think tanks — and the Israeli general public — is perversely spectacular:

Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst Elizabeth Murray learned.

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

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