Queer Atheist confronts the bourgeois political chatter!

As a regular watcher of Mr. Mercouris’ commentaries, I was not just disappointed, to hear him quote and extol Simon Schama Financial Times essay. And that for all of his insights of the past, as valuable as they are, and have been, Mr. Mercouris shares with other Technocrats an attachment to political/moral conformity. Walter Lippmann was an advocate of ‘the expert’ i.e. Technocrat, as a check of too much democracy: Its a toxic tradition and Mr. Mercouris seems to have imbibed some of this political toxin.

Note: the headline and sub-headline of Schama’s essay:

Opinion Israel-Hamas war

Simon Schama: Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep

In the face of lethal peril, help for Jews has always been conditional

https://www.ft.com/content/95fc03c2-f11f-4c22-8a38-3e32046c5c78

Note: before The Reader gets to Schama’ recitation of Jewish Victimhood tropes, there is this confounding revelation:

Headline: For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces

Sub-headline: The premier’s policy of treating the terror group as a partner, at the expense of Abbas and Palestinian statehood, has resulted in wounds that will take Israel years to heal from

By TAL SCHNEIDER 8 October 2023, 3:58 pm

https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

Palestinians wave their national flag and celebrate by a destroyed Israeli tank at the Gaza Strip fence east of Khan Younis, Oct. 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Yousef Masoud)

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Thus, amid this bid to impair Abbas, Hamas was upgraded from a mere terror group to an organization with which Israel held indirect negotiations via Egypt, and one that was allowed to receive infusions of cash from abroad.

Hamas was also included in discussions about increasing the number of work permits Israel granted to Gazan laborers, which kept money flowing into Gaza, meaning food for families and the ability to purchase basic products.

Israeli officials said these permits, which allow Gazan laborers to earn higher salaries than they would in the enclave, were a powerful tool to help preserve calm.

…

Is Netanyahu complicit in the murders committed by Hamas, is how The New York Times might have phrased this, in another dimension of space/time. Reader do you have the patience for Schama’s intervention? Still riffing in that New York Times Time Dimension.

The opening paragraphs of Schama’s essay:

Confronted with enormity: murdered infants, abducted grandmothers, slaughtered villagers, lusty chants of “gas the Jews” at the Free Palestine demonstration in Sydney, mere words feel like weak carriers of so much horror and sorrow. Journalistic bloviation on the cause of this and the effect of that seems an indecency, at least until the bodies are gathered and returned to families. So context me no contexts, analyse me no analyses, suspend your partially informed diagnoses; leave off your strenuous efforts at even-handedness. Let us be, to grieve, rage, weep; say the mourners’ kaddish.

Perhaps images, then, not words? Of terrified young people who in a trice went from dancing to frantic running in a futile attempt to escape the spray of bullets; of a kibbutz dog shot as it emerged from a house (that must have helped Free Palestine); a young woman with bloody marks staining her sweatpants as she is bundled away by captors; a knife lying on a sofa in the kibbutz Be’eri, where 10 per cent of the population were killed; or visual evidence of “resistance” like the video of Mor Bayder’s murdered grandmother uploaded by her killers to Mor’s Facebook page.

…

https://www.ft.com/content/95fc03c2-f11f-4c22-8a38-3e32046c5c78

Note: Schama presents himself as an honest critic ? In sum Palestinians are incapable of moral/political agency, they are victims of ‘fanatical tyrants’ as if the Nakba, and 75 years of oppression and murder by Zionist ‘fanatical tyrants’ has not taught them lessons that can’t be forgotten?

There is, rightly, sympathy too for the Palestinians of Gaza who are also victims and prisoners of Hamas and do not deserve to be punished for the wickedness perpetrated by their fanatical tyrants, nor for the delusion that the deaths of Jewish families will make Israel disappear.

Note: Here is where Schama ends his essay, with a quote from Deuteronomy, 30. 19:

But Israel will survive, revive. If only because, even in this dreadful extremity, one text from Deuteronomy, 30. 19 lies at the indefatigably beating heart of Jewish history: I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.

’I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, a blessing and a curse: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.’

Note: As a Queer I have no patience for the cobbled together Texts of the Bible, nor those who quote it as an expression of ‘Gospel’! I was exposed these ‘claims’ in Sunday School and Vacation Bible School: I’m not a child anymore!

At the Council of Hippo, held in north Africa in AD 393, a group of church leaders recognized a list of books that they believed to be scripture. Later, the Council of Carthage affirmed that decision in AD 397.

http://www.daleentwistle.co.uk/who-chose-the-books-of-the-bible/#:~:text=Eventually%2C%20the%20question%20was%20taken,that%20decision%20in%20AD%20397.

Queer Atheist