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Empires commit many crimes that they want to hide, airbrush and forget about. This statement today by Emmanuel Macron about Gaza provides a good snapshot.
“I do share your view that the first objective we should have today is the release of all hostages without any hesitation,” he told Israel’s president, and he accused Hamas of playing with lives. He said he wanted Israel to be sure that it was not alone in the fight against terrorism. He described it as a “duty” to fight against terrorist groups. He said “targeted operations” were a necessity.
Macron said: “We will do whatever we can to restore peace, security and stability for your country and the whole region. What happened will never be forgotten, for sure. And we will be here today, tomorrow and the day after for peace and stability. Because these people were killed just because they were Jewish, and they wanted to live in peace.”
Macron does not care about hostages.
Israel has conducted many raids within Gaza and the occupied territories, arresting Palestinians (many children) without charge or trial. They are abused and held indefinitely. In any other context this would be called hostage taking – but their very existence cannot be acknowledged lest it illuminate the racist double standard in which western hostages are the ‘first objective’ but Palestinian hostages do not exist.
Macron namechecks ‘the fight against terrorism’ but this is bogus.
Israel has via its terrorism of illegal invasions, occupations, apartheid, bombings, shootings, beatings, rapes, home invasions, ethnic cleansing and hostage taking – attempted to cower and displace the Palestinian people for decades. France has its own terrorism including racist police brutality, the suppression of dissent and atrocities committed in defence of its colonial assets abroad. Note the reframe and the amnesia.
Israel is not engaged in a fight against a terrorist group – it has not entered Gaza to seek Hamas, instead it has inflicted three weeks of racist indiscriminate bombing against defenceless civilians. Macron attempts to reframe these crimes against humanity as some noble cause and we are simultaneously invited to join him in forgetting everything that Israel did before and after October 7th.
When reframes and calls to amnesia don’t work then packs of outright lies are told. After the bombing of the al-Ahli Arab Hospital, hastily concocted lies were bundled alongside renewed calls for amnesia. These lies were rubber stamped by Israel and western intelligence agencies.
We are supposed to forget all the lies of western intelligence agencies about WMD’S in Iraq, Chemical Weapons in Syria, Saudi war crimes in Yemen, NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, Nordstream 2, the long established pattern of Israeli lies and the endless pathological lying of the western political and media class itself.
The lies about the hospital bombing also attempt to buttress the notion that Macon alludes to, that Israel is engaged in ‘targeted operations’ in Gaza when nothing could be further from the truth. The Israelis themselves have said they have no interest in such niceties.
Israel, Macron and the west have no interest in regional stability as their illegal invasions, bombings and rhetoric prove. These lies are for domestic consumption only, to throw sand in the eyes of anyone who might protest the fascist atrocities of Israel in particular and the growing overall fascism of the west. By invoking anti-Semitism Macron wants to weaponise the Holocaust and provide Israel with both moral camouflage and a licence to continue its genocide against Palestinians.
If one resists the lies and propaganda of the west, one realises that lies now practically define it. We ingest so many lies in fact that we risk forgetting that truth exists. But the truth does still exist.
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth – sooner or later that debt is paid.
The savage unfairness of modern life is that the debt is rarely paid by the liars – but by innocents like the 2,000 murdered Palestinian children of Gaza.
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Since 2013 I have worked on this Ad-Free site: trying to give a voice to those without the power or agency to speak out for themselves and speaking simple truths that well paid journalists in the corporate media dare not utter.
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