It is time to hold institutions accountable. The belief that organizations like the UN, the World Food Programme, or Amnesty International are neutral by default—and therefore above criticism—no longer holds. These institutions carry moral authority only as long as they earn it. When they abandon impartiality and become tools of ideological conflict, they must be exposed.
Dismantle the antizionist complex.
@arabislamblog Bon dia! Dins la tradició ortodoxa també es commemora el dia de martiri (l'11 de setembre / el 29 d'agost). És un dia de dejuni on fins al s XX tampoc es menjaven aliments de forma esfèrica (com el cap del Sant 😔)
France is the world's second largest arms exporter. Its weapons have a nasty habit of finding their way to, for example, Sudanese paramilitaries, though no one knows exactly where French weapons go because of the country's secrecy laws.
So forgive me for suggesting that France isn't closing up Israeli defense contractors' pavilions in Paris because of its morals, because of Gaza or Iran, but because Israeli systems have a nasty habit of outselling French ones in any fair competition. Whether it's old and dependable buyers like Morocco or, most embarrassingly, Europe itself as it races to arm against Putin amid America's retreat from European defense, Israeli systems consistently outperform French ones and are starting to outsell them.
And here, in real time, is a kind of microcosm of the Palestinian experience of international "support": Nearly everyone who raises the banner of their cause is using them for their own self-interest and has no plans to follow through with any serious policy, sacrifices or investment that might move the needle for them.
Iran, a regime that does not grant freedom to its own people, is not fighting Israel to grant freedom to Palestinians, but to dominate the Arabs and drive the forceful expansion of its revolutionary religious ideology.
Western activists seeking to enter Gaza via Egypt discovered to their horror this week one of the most obvious and basic facts about the Gaza war: That Egypt's military dictatorship doesn't care one whit how much Palestinians suffer behind the heavily-armed border fence it has installed between Egypt and Gaza. That this came as a shock to Western activists is itself a function of the fact that they know very little about the subjects of their moral emotions, because the basic purpose of Palestinian activism in the West isn't to move the needle for Palestinians - a task that would require knowledge and nuance and a capacity for self-critique - but merely to experience those moral emotions. I know it can be hard to see it, but this is as far from actual focused concern for Palestinians as Iran's, Egypt's and France's diverse hypocrisies. If given the choice between, for example, an Israeli victory that produces a free and prosperous Gaza and an Israeli loss that sends Gaza back into the clutches of Hamas for another generation, most of these activists will enthusiastically endorse the latter. Because feelings.
And the French, God bless 'em, discovered their concern over Israeli armaments at precisely the moment when they became uncomfortably competitive against their own.
Welcome to the real world, kids.
The irony is that these kinds of desperate French ploys aren't going to work. Who needs expos when the capabilities of Israeli weapons systems are on display in real life? Every single European defense planner just watched what Israeli military tech can do against Iran's mostly Russian-made systems - the very systems Europe expects to actually encounter in the battlefield. Actual danger focuses the mind. No one in Europe is interested in wounded French pride. They're increasingly turning down bloated and unreliable French systems and coming to Israel for multi-year multi-billion-euro deals.
h/t @Eran_Efrat
Hard truth: I wrote about gay desire 20 years ago. Since then, I have written about war, friendship, talking animals, art, death, and disability. If you want me to write about desire again, someone is going to have to step up, take the hit for the team, and fall in love with me.