The theater of hypocrisy

I've been known to draw a few cartoons, and I know that good gigs don't come along very often. Were I a young French cartoonist desperate for work, I might have become a Charlie Hebdo staffer. And I might have ended up as one of the corpses in that office.

That said...

Yesterday's display of "unity" in Paris seemed staged, manipulated, and -- ultimately -- quite unsettling. The right side of the media has castigated Obama and other top officials for not participating in this piece of theater. If you ask me, the President did well to stay home.

An anti-terrorist event that welcomes Bibi Netanyahu? Are you kidding?

CNN covered Bibi's arrival in Paris pretty much the same way they would have covered DeGaulle's post-liberation march into that city, had CNN been around then. When future historians watch the footage taken yesterday, jaws will drop.

The Islamic terrorists who committed that heinous deed in the Charlie Hebdo office are babies compared to Bibi. If the assailants had been allowed total freedom to machine-gun everyone they didn't like for three weeks straight, they still could not have compiled a body count to match that of Bibi Netanyahu.

"We don't shoot women!" shouted the terrorists. The IDF sure as hell does. I could fill this post with dozens, hundreds of photos of women and children murdered in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. They died to fulfill the genocidal ambitions of Bibi and his fellow racists.

The important thing to understand is that the Charlie Hebdo attackers had been part of the anti-Assad rebellion. That rebel force would not exist without us. Using the Saudis and others as cut-outs, we funded the insurrection. Seymour Hersh says that the CIA made sure that arms from Libyan stores went to the Syrian rebels. We allowed extremists who normally would be on the "no fly" list to hop on airplanes and head to the combat zone. 

Unfortunately, most Americans do not know that our government made a Machiavellian decision to side (in secret) with the Sunni extremists. ISIS and Nusra began life as our proxy warriors against the great Shi'ite powers.

(Frankly, most Americans are too damned dumb to know the difference between Sunni and Shi'ite.)

Our rulers believe that the goal of undermining Syria and Iran justifies working (covertly) with the exact same maniacs who have beheaded journalists and attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices.

As we have demonstrated in previous posts, Israel has aided ISIS on many occasions. When Bibi showed up in France, he should not have been applauded; he should have been arrested and tried as a co-conspirator.

Free speech. The most appalling aspect of this exercise in political theater is the hypocritical embrace of "freedom of the press" by the very people who continually seek to restrict our range of permissible thought. As this perceptive writer noted a few days ago,

In the midst of this orgy of democratic hypocrisy, no reference is made to the fact that the American military, in the course of its wars in the Middle East, is responsible for the deaths of at least 15 journalists. In the on-going narrative of “Freedom of Speech Under Attack,” there is no place for any mention of the 2003 air-to-surface missile attack on the offices of Al Jazeera in Baghdad that left three journalists dead and four wounded.

Nor is anything being written or said about the July 2007 murder of two Reuters journalists working in Baghdad, staff photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh. Both men were deliberately targeted by US Apache gunships while on assignment in East Baghdad.

The American and international public was first able to view a video of the cold-blooded murder of the two journalists as well as a group of Iraqis—taken from one of the gunships—as the result of WikiLeaks’ release of classified material that it had obtained from an American soldier, Corporal Bradley Chelsea Manning.

We all know what happened to Manning and Assange.

Noam Chomsky also cites examples of the American military deliberately targeting journalists.

By the same token, we can readily comprehend the comment in the New York Times of civil rights lawyer Floyd Abrams, noted for his forceful defense of freedom of expression, that the Charlie Hebdo attack is “the most threatening assault on journalism in living memory.” He is quite correct about “living memory,” which carefully assigns assaults on journalism and acts of terror to their proper categories: Theirs, which are horrendous; and Ours, which are virtuous and easily dismissed from living memory.

Let us not forget the American assault on journalists during the Iraq invasion. The image to your right shows an American tank firing directly at the hotel where Al Jazeera newsfolk were known to be staying. Of course they were deliberately targeted; only an idiot would believe otherwise.

Why does no-one speak of the journalists killed in Gaza during last year's barbaric assault by the IDF?

Am I the only one who recalls what happened to Mother Agnes, a voice for peace in Syria? She was silenced. The denial of her right to free speech was nothing short of scandalous:

Mother Agnes has been subject to a vicious internet campaign of character assassination, smears and defamation. We’ve been told that she is an ‘Assad apologist,’ ‘Assad‘s favourite nun’- she has even been called ‘the Syrian equivalent of one of Hitler’s brown priests’.

The reason she has been attacked – and why it was so important to stop her speaking at the Stop the War event- is because her first-hand account of what has actually been happening in Syria challenges the dominant western narrative.

What was this woman's sin? She tried to warn the world about the extremists now known as ISIS. That's right: Mother Agnes was defamed, marginalized and silenced because she spoke out against the same maniacal movement that produced the Charlie Hebdo assault.

How many times have we heard defenders of Israel arrogantly inform us that we don't have the right to speak unless we say what they want us to say?

Consider the villification of Penelope Cruz, Javier Bardem and Gary Oldman. Whenever anyone in Hollywood speaks of the oppression of the Palestinians, the truth-tellers are threatened with being blackballed. How dare the blackballers invoke "freedom of speech"?

Until recently, I had contacts with people in "the industry." I can tell you for a fact that a lot of people (including some Jews) would love to speak out against the things Israel has done. They dare not. They keep their mouths shut in order to continue to work.

Professor Schlomo Sand, one of the most interesting historians Israel has produced, has infuriated many with his claim that modern Palestinians -- not European Jews -- are the true offspring of the Jews of the Bible. I'm not sure that I buy his thesis, although the argument is fascinating. (Despite his endearingly terrible English, Sand is riveting in this YouTube video.) Because his ideas undermine a beloved myth, Sand has been muzzled.

When Norman Finkelstein wrote a book offering a point-by-point critique of a pro-Israel work by Alan Dershowtiz, Dershowtiz and the powers-that-be did everything they could to squelch publication. It's an amazing story, told at length in the video embedded above.

The people who shot up the offices of Charlie Hebdo took up the gun only because they lacked more subtle -- and more effective -- means to silence their opponents. The people who control our media (usually) don't need guns. They have more powerful weapons.

Welcome to the theater of hypocrisy.