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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The Colonial Pipeline hack attack caused gas shortages all around the US, sparking massive amounts of mindless — and straight-up stupid — panic buying, and Israel was no exception — and the US, of course, was happy to sell them all the shit they could burn in Gaza this week.

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A little over a month ago, Democratic Party “rising star” (spit) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted “this is a massacre”, referring to the Israeli slaughter of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza. Needless to say, as soon as the establishment pushed back, she immediately started waffling her ass off and folded faster than Superman on laundry day, saying that she posted that tweet “as an activist” and not a Congressmember. However, now that she’s a member of Congress, she’s apparently willing to “learn and evolve” — which, as someone who grew up in Washington DC, I understand to mean “flip-flop”, or “do an Obama” as we say these days.

Granted, the focus of her activism was on economic issues, but still — if you’re going to run for Congress, you also need to keep up on lots of other issues as well, such as the 70 years of brutal occupation of Palestine and the Gaza Strip by Israel, and the ongoing mass murder of Palestinians in Gaza.

What especially galled the hell out of me is that initially, Ocasio belted out the straight, raw truth — but when the pushback hit, her first instinct was to backpedal rather than show some backbone and stand her ground in solidarity with the people of Gaza against Israeli barbarity. All the walking back, backpedaling and explaining she can possibly do now will do her no good because, as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

At least we found out early.

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I’m honestly lost for anything ironic or pithy to add to this, so I’m just going to leave this here:

“Maher Harara, 48, from the Shujaiya neighborhood east of Gaza City, told Human Rights Watch that ‘he saw a woman’s finger shot off as she was making a victory sign’ as she stood about 40 meters from the fences.”

– “Impose Sanctions on Netanyahu for Gaza War Crimes, says HRW”,
Electronic Intifada, 06.14.18

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