It Comes Around

It cannot be a revelation to anyone that YouTube shorts can be an addictive thing.  Between all the AI Slop and ads for manscaping tools, anti-sag bras and pillows, there are of course dance trends, comedy clips, teasers for new music, genuinely panic inducing extreme sports feats like breakneck skateboarding down busy San Francisco streets, and of course, Gaza.  I don't know about you but for me the videos about Gaza had been among the top categories of shorts in my feed until recently (neck and neck with ICE related abominations) when they started to be eclipsed by Iran. Originally documenting the impact of Iraeli and US missiles on Teheran and other Iranian cities, I've noticed a new category piercing through the din, and these are hits on Tel Aviv in particular from Iranian missiles breaching Israel's Iron Dome and making direct hits on military and civilian targets.   It could be my algorithm but I notice that the comments in these videos from around the world, the US included are nearly 100% on the side of Iran.  In contrast, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reports with dismay that 93% of Israelis support Israel and the US's war of choice against Iran and Lebanon in which 800,000 Lebanese and 3.2 million Iranian civilians have already been displaced from their homes (on top of the nearly 2 million in Gaza) many of them by the makings of an ecological disaster caused by the firebombing of Iranian refineries.   Before Israel's US-enabled genocide in Gaza, I never would have thought I would one day be cheering the destuction of Israeli architecture along with random commenters from Ireland, South America, Scandinavia, South Korea, Indonesia, Turkey and Russia, but here I am.  And yet, I am also aware that this quick turnabout in the world's tolerance for Israel's aggressions is the stuff of tragedy that could have been avoided,   It has been brought upon Israel by Israel itself, aided and abetted by the United States.

Kyle Kulinski has been chronicling the implosion of support for Donald Trump, highlighting in a recent video the viral bemoaning of a Florida former MAGA man for "Uncle Joe" as an indication of how far Trump's esteem among the electorate has fallen.  Indeed polls indicate a 48%-40% lead for Biden over Trump in popularity.   One poll has indicated that if the election were held again today, Kamala Harris herself would beat Trump by 8 points.  For my part, while I applaud any acknowledgement that America made the wrong choice in November 2024, the recent surge is nothing for either Democrat to be proud of.  On the contrary, it was Joe Biden's enabling of Israel's genocide of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Harris's refusal to give the smallest sign that her administration would be different that is largely responsible as her own team privately acknowledged for her defeat.  And it was her defeat that enabled this dark era of American authored apocalypse around the world.

While I still regularly grieve over the difference a Harris administration would have made to the alternate history of the world, I do not share Florida MAGA man's longing for "Uncle Joe."  To the contrary, I am rooting for the slim possibility that a sizeable chunk of the remainder of Joe Biden's life is consumed with the question of what he thought he was doing greenlighting, funding and stocking Israel's genocidal response to Hamas's October 7 2023 attack on its breach of Israel's apartheid wall around Gaza, and  fostering a repression of American dissent via state (and State Department) sponsored conflation of Anti-Genocidal protest with Anti-Semitism.  It stretches credulity to think that someone as Inside Washington as Biden was for a very long career (one that bumped up fondly against the closing of the Segregationist era of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms) would have had as shallow a motivation in his unwavering support of Israel than mindless Zionism, and yet, while a venal reflex to not go against AIPAC surely played a part, it is also patently obvious that Biden was of the mistaken belief that he was doing a good thing.  This makes the consequence of his mistakenness all the more tragic.  If he was helping Israel, it was to burst out of the closet as a world class force for Imperialistic Evil.  If he thought he was playing his part in the ongoing restitution of European Jews for the horrors of the Holocaust, he was tragically doing the opposite. Israel's conduct since October 7 has lost what remained of the world's good will and instead through its violent hostility to an ever growing list of enemies that its own sociopathic behavior has studiously cultivated, stubbornly engendered a recognition around the world that the tiny state has been and appears to intend to continue to be the source of much of a growing danger to the future of humanity.  By not distinguishing herself from Biden's naïveté if not psychopathology with respect to Israel's imperialism-- not even to the slightest degree-- Kamala Harris paved the way to the even more insane and twisted dysfunctional collaboration of the Trump Administration with Netanyahu's Israel. 

Israel has long thrived on its demand for the acquiescence of the world to its privileged special pleading, so much so that it had come to expect it.  It is a bitter irony that we can only hope the world survives long enough to enjoy and learn from that its very confidence in its entitlement to misbehave is the cause of the ill will radiating toward it from every corner of the earth.