Tuppence for the war

It's hard to know what to say about the Israeli onslaught in Gaza that hasn't already been said. This is the fourth such assault the Israeli state has carried out on its neighbours I think in ten years. Lenin's Tomb is of course doing a bang up job. Shabogan Graffiti has some excellent posts on the barbaric propaganda coming out of the BBC. 

At a surface level it's an utter paradox why the right would hate such a consistent and successful establishment propaganda tool. We forget sometimes that the ruling class (with its competing empires) is not homogeneous. It needs a state in part to make fractions of the class, such as the network of power round News International, knuckle under for the greater bourgeois good. It needs accepted 'neutral' ideological outlets. The BBC is neutral when it comes to intra ruling class conflicts. It is though fiercely partisan when it comes to class on class conflict, state on state conflict.

Only six or so weeks ago he Israeli leader Binyamin Netanyahu was in the United Nations shilling for war on Iran. It seems he'll have to make do with kicking the Palestinians, again. He'll get all the help he could ask from the BBC.

This is also a test for the Arab Spring, especially the Egyptians. This is the Egyptian IS statement on the war:

“Today the Zionist enemy is preparing a ground attack on Gaza. But Egyptian gas still flows to Israel, the Rafah border crossing is still closed—and the Camp David agreement remains in force. 

“Why are Morsi, his advisers, ministers and organisation waiting? They should put in practice what they always preached before coming to power—cutting all ties with the Zionist enemy, abolishing the Camp David agreement, deploying the Egyptian army in Sinai and permanently reopening the Rafah crossing.”

Geography lesson with the International Olympic Committee

Yes, you're reading it right. Israel is in Europe, Palestine is in Asia. The mind boggles and yet it makes an eerie kind of sense. Palestinians of count for less than Israelis in ruling class ideology. Even though they live in the same place, they may as well be from another continent.

It's a mad, mad, mad, mad reich

No self-respecting white supremacist likes admitting they're prejudiced toward the ethnic minoritah. It's a state based ethnic purity and superiority, like good old Rhodesia, but with much better liberal cred. Given that it was founded as an understandable, if flawed response to the awful crime of the holocaust, anyone who actively opposed to the Israeli state is a genocidal fascist, and anyone who has any sympathy for Palestinians is an appeaser. As we know from Godwin's Law it's always a good thing to be seen as fighting fascism. The Israeli state is also the cutting edge of western imperial intervention into the Middle East, it's two for the price of one! So it was no surprise when:

Education Secretary Michael Gove stopped eight schools sending pupils to a Palestinian literature festival.

Mr Gove challenged headteachers in Islington and Haringey to justify why they planned to participate in the event, run by a branch of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

It's because it was a scabrous, lefty mind-wash trying to prove that Palestinians are actually existing people. It can't possibly be because Palestinians have a vibrant and interesting literary culture worth exploring in any way. They can't have. They don't exist. And it was definitely a low-brow left-fest because it was only supported by a former Children's Laureate and a local MP.

Our rulers are loonies. Expect being Palestinian to be deemed anti-Semitic in and of itself by 2015.