The Final Extermination of Palestine Has Begun...

Paul Craig Roberts • August 29, 2024

In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli colonial army has pushed the 2 million surviving Palestinians into an area of less than 15 square kilometers (less than 6 square miles). It continues bombing them. The obvious aim is to push the whole population into Egypt’s Sinai desert and to provide their land to illegal settlers.

The US enables the Israeli genocide while the UK and EU applaud it and criminalize dissent against it. The Arab states stand aside and watch. Which one of them will be next?

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/08/israel-starts-ethnical-cleansing-in-west-bank.html

August 28, 2024
Israel Starts Ethnic Cleansing In West Bank [ This should read: “Israel Completes Ethnic Cleansing in West Bank Begun in 1947” ]

The Anglo-American colonial project in Palestine has launched another war to remove the indigenous population from its land.

Israel launches major operation in West Bank; Palestinian officials say 9 killed – Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/28/israel-gaza-war-west-bank-palestinian/

TEL AVIV — Israel launched a major operation in multiple cities in the West Bank on Wednesday involving hundreds of troops.

The troops were sent in with air support and bulldozers, according to an Israeli military official speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive military operation. Eyewitnesses cited drones scanning the skies and armored personnel carriers carrying troops on the ground.

The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service, announced in a brief joint statement they were launching a counterterrorism operation in Jenin and Tulkarm. [“Anti-terrorism” is Israel’s code name for throwing Palestinians out of their homes and off of their land.] Operations were also reported in al-Fara’a refugee camp, near Tubas. At least nine Palestinians have been killed since midnight, the Health Ministry in Ramallah said. Seven were taken to a hospital in Tubas and two to a hospital in Jenin, it said.
Since June 1967, when the Zionist launched a war against its Arab neighbors, it has illegally occupied the West Bank and Gaza.

Today Israel’s foreign minister Israel Katz tweeted in Hebrew (machine translation):
ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz @Israel_katz – 4:42 UTC · Aug 28, 2024 “The IDF is working intensively from tonight in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps to thwart Islamic-Iranian terrorist infrastructures that have been established there. Iran is working to establish an eastern terrorist front against Israel in the West Bank, according to the Gaza and Lebanon model, by financing and arming terrorists and smuggling advanced weapons from Jordan.

We must deal with the threat just as we deal with the terrorist infrastructure in Gaza, including the temporary evacuation of Palestinian residents and whatever steps are required. This is a war for everything and we must win it.” [ These Israeli claims are entirely made up in order to provide cover and justification for seizing the final remnants of the West Bank. As the remnants of the West Bank are entirely surrounded by Israeli territory, it is impossible to smuggle weapons into the West Bank. See map. Click on map to enlarge.]

In the Gaza strip the colonial army has pushed the 2 million surviving Palestinians into an area of less than 15 square kilometer. It continues bombing them. The obvious aim is to push the whole population into Egypt’s Sinai desert and to provide their land to illegal settlers.

A similar project has now started in the West Bank. The Zionists plan to raze it and then push its Palestinian population across the river into Jordan.

There is little support the Palestinians can count on. The ‘western’ world is supporting the Zionist entity with all it has. The U.S., Germany and others provide it with a steady stream of weapons and ammunition. The Arab world is mostly silent. Turkey provides the Zionist entity with oil stolen from the Kurdish regions in Iraq. Egypt has expanded its economic ties with Israel by becoming a way station for imports to that country.

The axis of resistance, a mixed agglomeration of irregular forces in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen – nurtured by Iran – is the sole external force that is willing to intervene.

But the axis has so far been careful to not give a cause for a U.S. intervention against itself. Hezbullah in Lebanon has settled one of its conflict accounts with Israel. As Alastair Crooke in a talk with Judge Napolitano (vid) quoted here by Yves Smith, provides:

[6:40] “What we have seen is the war fragmenting in different ways. First of all, it fragmented with the killing of Fuad Shukr in Beirut just before Haniyeh was killed in Tehran. And for that reason, the actual operations of the Resistance changed. Because as far as Hezbollah was concerned, the killing of Fuad crossed all red lines, all the understandings, the careful balances were broken by that. And they opened a separate account, quite separate to what was happening in Gaza. And they opened a separate account.

“And so what happened in this weekend was about settling that account with Israel. And it stuck very carefully to the equation, the war equations, that they had between Israel and Hezbollah. The didn’t go out of the equations. So if you like they attacked in Tel Aviv the Mossad headquarters and the headquarters of 8200, equivalent roughly to NSA in the US, if you like, it’s the communications intercept. Because that was the decision-making if you like structure that led to Fuad Shukr’s killing in Beirut. And they did in Tel Aviv because they killed him in Beirut. There was a complete equivalence if you like in that.”

Hezbollah and Israel have settled the account over the killing of Fuad Shukr. But the accounting for the Zionist war against Palestine is not yet finished.

The operation also created deterrence against further Zionist attacks on leaders of the resistance (https://www.raialyoum.com/did-hezbollahs-attack-undermine-israels-assassination-approach/):

“Hezbollah’s response of missiles and drones early yesterday morning in Israeli territory, specifically in the central area of Tel Aviv, is significant because it means that Israeli operations to kill leaders of resistance groups in Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen will now be met with a prompt and effective response. Furthermore, these operations have come to incur substantial costs.

“Efforts by the Israeli entity to cover its growing number of defeats and failures through fabrications and forgeries are no longer effective, as resistance groups are exposing them on the ground through precise counteractions.”

Iran, which still has to revenge the recent killing of Hamas leader Haniyeh in Tehran, will make a similar calculation. Its upcoming operation against Israel related to the Haniyeh case will be separate from its defense of Palestine’s rights and population.

That defense will continue until all rights of the Palestinian, including the right to return to their land, are restored.
Posted by b on August 28, 2024 at 10:19 UTC | Permalink

This is a curious report, a combination of fact and unreality. Israel has never given back an inch of the land Israel has stolen from Palestine. Israel will certainly not give back Gaza and the small remnants of the West Bank considering the trouble to which Israel has gone in order to empty Palestine of Palestinians. The October 7 attack has been used precisely as I forecast. Palestine no longer exists; yet Western idiots keep talking about a two-state solution.

Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy were the last American presidents capable of standing up to Israel. And Americans think they live in a superpower. What they live in is a super-compliant Israeli puppet state. A long line of Israeli prime ministers have boasted of this fact. But if a gentile mentions it or even quotes an Israeli prime minister boasting of their power over Washington, the gentile is said to be anti-semitic.

As for the West’s “moral concerns,” see    this:    https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2024/08/27/mike-whitney-wonders-if-biowarfare-is-being-brought-to-gazans-in-the-form-of-polio-vaccine/

(Republished from paulcraigroberts by permission of author or representative)

https://www.unz.com/proberts/the-final-extermination-of-palestine-has-begun/

 

by John W. And Nisha Whitehead | Aug 29, 2024

“Internet platforms have a powerful incentive to please important federal officials, and the record in this case shows that high-ranking officials skillfully exploited Facebook’s vulnerability… Not surprisingly these efforts bore fruit. Facebook adopted new rules that better conformed to the officials’ wishes, and many users who expressed disapproved views about the pandemic or COVID–19 vaccines were ‘deplatformed’ or otherwise injured.”
—Justice Samuel Alito, dissenting in Murthy v. Missouri 

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, has finally admitted what we knew all along: Facebook conspired with the government to censor individuals expressing “disapproved” views about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Zuckerberg’s confession comes in the wake of a series of court rulings that turn a blind eye to the government’s technofascism.

In a 2-1 decision in Children’s Health Defense v. Meta, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed a lawsuit brought by Children’s Health Defense against Meta Platforms for restricting CHD’s posts, fundraising, and advertising on Facebook following communications between Meta and federal government officials.

In a unanimous decision in the combined cases of NetChoice v. Paxton and Moody v. NetChoice, the U.S. Supreme Court avoided ruling on whether the states could pass laws to prohibit censorship by Big Tech companies on social media platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube.

And in a 6-3 ruling in Murthy v. Missouri , the Supreme Court sidestepped a challenge to the federal government’s efforts to coerce social media companies into censoring users’ First Amendment expression.

Welcome to the age of technocensorship.

On paper—under the First Amendment, at least—we are technically free to speak.

In reality, however, we are now only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow.

Case in point: internal documents released by the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government confirmed what we have long suspected: that the government has been working in tandem with social media companies to censor speech.

By “censor,” we’re referring to concerted efforts by the government to muzzle, silence and altogether eradicate any speech that runs afoul of the government’s own approved narrative.

This is political correctness taken to its most chilling and oppressive extreme.

The revelations that Facebook worked in concert with the Biden administration to censor content related to COVID-19, including humorous jokes, credible information and so-called disinformation, followed on the heels of a ruling by a federal court in Louisiana that prohibits executive branch officials from communicating with social media companies about controversial content in their online forums.

Likening the government’s heavy-handed attempts to pressure social media companies to suppress content critical of COVID vaccines or the election to “an almost dystopian scenario,” Judge Terry Doughty warned that “the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”

This is the very definition of technofascism.

Clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, technofascism is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem to achieve a common goal.

The government is not protecting us from “dangerous” disinformation campaigns. It is laying the groundwork to insulate us from “dangerous” ideas that might cause us to think for ourselves and, in so doing, challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.

Thus far, the tech giants have been able to sidestep the First Amendment by virtue of their non-governmental status, but it’s a dubious distinction at best when they are marching in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

As Philip Hamburger and Jenin Younes write for The Wall Street Journal: “The First Amendment prohibits the government from ‘abridging the freedom of speech.’ Supreme Court doctrine makes clear that government can’t constitutionally evade the amendment by working through private companies.”

Nothing good can come from allowing the government to sidestep the Constitution.

The steady, pervasive censorship creep that is being inflicted on us by corporate tech giants with the blessing of the powers-that-be threatens to bring about a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

Orwell intended 1984 as a warning. Instead, it is being used as a dystopian instruction manual for socially engineering a populace that is compliant, conformist and obedient to Big Brother.

In a world increasingly automated and filtered through the lens of artificial intelligence, we are finding ourselves at the mercy of inflexible algorithms that dictate the boundaries of our liberties.

Once artificial intelligence becomes a fully integrated part of the government bureaucracy, there will be little recourse: we will all be subject to the intransigent judgments of techno-rulers.

This is how it starts.

First, the censors went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “hate speech.”

Then they went after so-called extremists spouting so-called “disinformation” about stolen elections, the Holocaust, and Hunter Biden.

By the time so-called extremists found themselves in the crosshairs for spouting so-called “misinformation” about the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccines, the censors had developed a system and strategy for silencing the nonconformists.

Eventually, depending on how the government and its corporate allies define what constitutes “extremism, “we the people” might all be considered guilty of some thought crime or other.

Whatever we tolerate now—whatever we turn a blind eye to—whatever we rationalize when it is inflicted on others, whether in the name of securing racial justice or defending democracy or combatting fascism, will eventually come back to imprison us, one and all.

Watch and learn.

We should all be alarmed when any individual or group—prominent or not—is censored, silenced and made to disappear from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram for voicing ideas that are deemed politically incorrect, hateful, dangerous or conspiratorial.

Given what we know about the government’s tendency to define its own reality and attach its own labels to behavior and speech that challenges its authority, this should be cause for alarm across the entire political spectrum.

Here’s the point: you don’t have to like or agree with anyone who has been muzzled or made to disappear online because of their views, but to ignore the long-term ramifications of such censorship is dangerously naïve, because whatever powers you allow the government and its corporate operatives to claim now will eventually be used against you by tyrants of your own making.

As Glenn Greenwald writes for The Intercept:

The glaring fallacy that always lies at the heart of pro-censorship sentiments is the gullible, delusional belief that censorship powers will be deployed only to suppress views one dislikes, but never one’s own views… Facebook is not some benevolent, kind, compassionate parent or a subversive, radical actor who is going to police our discourse in order to protect the weak and marginalized or serve as a noble check on mischief by the powerful. They are almost always going to do exactly the opposite: protect the powerful from those who seek to undermine elite institutions and reject their orthodoxies. Tech giants, like all corporations, are required by law to have one overriding objective: maximizing shareholder value. They are always going to use their power to appease those they perceive wield the greatest political and economic power.

Be warned: it’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.

Eventually, as Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.

If the government can control speech, it can control thought and, in turn, it can control the minds of the citizenry.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s happening already.

With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”

What we are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.

Seventy-plus years after Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 depicted a fictional world in which books are burned in order to suppress dissenting ideas, while televised entertainment is used to anesthetize the populace and render them easily pacified, distracted and controlled, we find ourselves navigating an eerily similar reality.

Reprinted with permission from the Rutherford Institute.

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/technofascism-the-government-pressured-tech-companies-to-censor-users/

War on Gaza: Aid workers killed in Israeli strike on humanitarian convoy

 The attack on US charity's aid convoy heading to Emirati hospital comes hours after an Israeli strike targeted a World Food Programme convoy

Trucks loaded with humanitarian aid for the Gaza Strip sit waiting on the Egyptian side of the Rafah crossing, closed since early May, on 4 July 2024 (AFP)

By MEE staff

Published date: 30 August 2024 11:49 BST | Last update: 23 hours 53 mins ago

An Israeli air strike has hit a humanitarian aid convoy laden with medical supplies and fuel for an Emirati-run hospital in Rafah, killing several workers.

Israeli forces claimed the attack targeted “armed assailants” who were attempting to hijack the convoy, which was organised by the US charity, Anera.

But Anera said that several employees of the transportation company it had worked with had been killed in the attack. 

All the fatalities were in the vehicle leading the convoy, which was the target of the attack.

According to unconfirmed reports, five people were killed in the strike.

Anera reported that the convoy had been approved by Israeli authorities. 

In a statement Israeli forces confirmed the authorisation but claimed in a statement that “during the convoy’s movement, a number of armed assailants seized control of the vehicle in the front of the convoy (a Jeep) and began to lead it.”

The military further claimed that it had contacted Anera following the attack, and that the organisation had confirmed that “all of the convoy’s organisation members and humanitarian aid were safe and reached their destination as planned”.

Israel's attack on World Central Kitchen is part of its cynical war strategy

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Anera confirmed that the convoy had reached the hospital, and that only one of its employees had been travelling as part of it. The NGO added that they were unharmed in the attack.

“We are urgently seeking further details about what happened,” Anera’s Palestine country director, Sandra Rasheed said.

The air strike shortly follows another attack by Israeli forces on a convoy of two clearly marked World Food Programme trucks, prompting the UN to announce it was suspending its activities in Gaza.

"Despite being clearly marked and receiving multiple clearances by Israeli authorities to approach, the vehicle was directly struck by gunfire as it was moving towards an Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) checkpoint. It sustained at least ten bullets: five on the driver’s side, two on the passenger side and three on other parts of the vehicle," the WFP said in a statement.

In April, a deadly Israeli air strike targeted a World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy killing seven aid workers.

Middle East Eye reported in April that at least 357 humanitarian-run sites and convoys in Gaza whose coordinates had been shared in advance with warring parties were hit before the WCK attack.

UN officials and aid workers told MEE it had been clear for months that the humanitarian notification system in Gaza was broken.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/transportation-workers-killed-israeli-strike-humanitarian-aid-convoy-gaza

How state Islamophobia could come back to bite the West

David Hearst

30 August 2024 20:21 BST | Last update: 13 hours 21 mins ago

The US and UK have shunned the growing concerns of Muslim communities, opening the door to a far-right surge

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer speaks in Solihull, England, on 8 August 2024 (Joe Giddens/AFP)

Hatred against Muslims is going through the roof. In the US, public prejudice against Muslims is highest among all religious groups, according to a new Brookings Institution poll. 

In the UK, 92 percent of Muslims surveyed said they felt less safe living in Britain after the recent riots, and one in six had personally experienced an Islamophobic or racist incident in the week after the Southport stabbings.

The drop in positive attitudes towards Muslims in the US is especially prominent among Democrats, voters who would naturally identify themselves as progressive.

The Brookings poll found that after years of improvement, favourable views of Muslims decreased overall to 64 percent from 78 percent two years earlier, but the drop was more pronounced among Democrats.

Brookings identified a number of factors in this, including a generational change, a gap between public perceptions of Judaism and Islam, race, and college education - but the most eye-catching was evidence that opinion towards Islam was being affected by the statements and positions of public leaders.

Whereas former US President Donald Trump’s travel ban targeting people from seven Muslim-majority countries increased public sympathy with Muslims, President Joe Biden’s statements on Gaza appear to have had the opposite effect.

“President Joe Biden’s statements, coming at a time when there was high national attention on the war in Israel and Gaza, and especially the president’s tone, which some have criticized as insensitive to Muslim and Arab civilian casualties, raised the prospect that his stance may be dehumanizing Arabs and Muslims,” noted Shibley Telhami, a senior fellow with Brookings.

In the two polls conducted since the start of the Gaza war, Telhami said favourable views of Muslims dropped, especially among Democrats. The role of Biden’s stance as a possible factor in this trend would need “further exploration”, he said ominously.

Rejecting Palestinian voices

What, then, has been the response of political parties in the US and UK, which lay claim to presenting progressive opinions? How have the Democrats in the US and the Labour government in Britain reacted to this surge of racism against Muslims? 

Earlier this month, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)’s response was to reject a call to have a Palestinian speaker on the main stage of its convention. 

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This was not a question of insisting that a high-profile Palestinian American like Rashida Tlaib, who represents Michigan’s 12th congressional district, take the stage. She did not even go to her party’s convention. 

Rather, the speaker rejected by the DNC was an ordinary party representative who had been proposed by the Uncommitted movement, an influential group that includes many Arab Americans. They could make the difference between Trump or presidential nominee Kamala Harris winning Michigan, a key swing state.

They wanted a love fest. So they kept Gaza out of the party's celebrations

The DNC had no hesitation, however, in offering its platform to the family of an Israeli hostage. Yet while it hosted a panel on Palestinian human rights and provided credentials for Uncommitted leaders to attend the convention, the DNC could not bring itself to allow a Palestinian speaker even a token space on its platform - even at the risk of incurring electoral costs in a close election. 

Why did the party do this? The Washington Post reported that Democratic leaders were concerned that a convention speech addressing the war in Gaza would “threaten the unity” that had been present throughout the event.

They wanted a love fest. So they kept Gaza out of the party’s celebrations.

“I was just told that I don’t have a voice here in this party,” Layla Elabed, co-founder of the Uncommitted movement, told reporters on Wednesday.

Far-right riots

Is the same true in Britain?

Unfortunately, even more so. Keir Starmer’s premiership was shaken this summer by the worst race riots Britain had experienced in a century, sparked by a false rumour that the killer of three young girls at a dance class in Southport was Muslim.

Starmer visited a mosque in Solihull, where he was greeted by protesters, but he has done nothing publicly to meet representatives of the Muslim or Palestinian communities since, nor has any member of his government.

During the riots, Starmer ignored communications from the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), the country’s largest body representing British Muslims. 

Whether Starmer likes it or not, the MCB represents more than 500 members - mosques, schools, local councils, professional networks, and advocacy groups. No other Muslim group has this reach.

Since the riots, Starmer has ignored calls from 80 Muslim organisations to take concrete steps to tackle Islamophobia and to launch an independent review.

But this shunning of the Muslim community, the principal victim of the riots, does not mean the government has been inactive. It has been highly responsive to representatives of the Jewish community.

UK riots: The fascist threat is resurgent. Here's how to stop it

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Foreign Secretary David Lammy recently met the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis. They talked about Britain’s foreign policy. Could you imagine the fuss if a British imam demanded to see the foreign secretary to discuss the country’s foreign policy?

But Lammy was unabashed. “We discussed the imminent and vast threats facing Israel across the Middle East, UK Government decisions relating to the conflict, the urgent importance of freeing the hostages, achieving long term peace, and the deep impact of the war in this country,” Mirvis wrote on X, alongside a photo of him with the foreign secretary.

In addition, Science Secretary Peter Kyle recently met several Jewish groups, including the Community Security Trust, the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Holocaust Educational Trust, to discuss measures to combat antisemitism online.

It is right that such a meeting takes place. But how on earth can it be right that Kyle does not also meet representatives of the Muslim community to discuss the tidal wave of Islamophobic abuse on social media?

Two-tiered value system

How can any government, let alone a supposedly left-leaning, internationalist one, get away with boycotting such a significant community weeks after it was explicitly targeted by fascists and thugs?

And why is it that Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, is following in the footsteps of far-right Suella Braverman, in continuing the government’s appeal against a high court ruling over a law that has seen hundreds of people arrested and convicted for peacefully protesting?

Racist abuse against British Muslims has become a massive and ugly problem across the country. No Muslim in Britain feels safe after the riots.

All racist abuse against any British citizen should be dealt with equally, but this is patently not the case under Starmer’s two-tiered system of values. Why is it that racism against Jewish citizens seems to be given so much more weight by this government than racism against British Muslims?

Why is it that racism against Jewish citizens seems to be given so much more weight by this government than racism against British Muslims?  

The anti-Muslim bias of this government is so deeply rooted that it overcomes even the patent instinct politicians have for their own survival. 

Labour lost four seats over its policy in Gaza in the last elections and narrowly scraped through in a fifth. The Muslim community is a massive voting bloc. Why shun it? Why behave as if it does not exist?

Is it racism? Is it the fear of being labelled antisemitic if the government meets relatives of Palestinians slaughtered in Gaza by the Israeli army? Or is the need to support Israel, no matter what war crimes it commits, that figures most in Starmer’s mind?

Whatever the case, this issue is not about foreign policy or Israel. It’s about how the British government deals with British citizens, particularly ones targeted by racist mobs. It’s about the equality of political rights in the US.

Mosques need more than physical protection. An event of the magnitude and geographical scope of the UK riots - one big enough to stop Starmer from taking his summer holiday - needs a commission of inquiry. Why is he resisting pressure to set one up? Is Starmer, a former human rights lawyer, frightened at what it could find?

Global battle

Muslims are not a minority. There are more than 1.8 billion of them, or about one-quarter of the world’s population.

Starmer and Biden’s shunning of Muslims over the paramount need to have Israel’s back is extensively and exhaustively covered in the Arab media daily. This coverage is further evidence for Arab communities that the West does not care that nothing has changed since colonial days.

Just imagine the effect it would have if either Britain or the US reversed course and listened to a Muslim voice, even if they did not like what was said.

Activists participate in a pro-Palestinian protest near the US Capitol in Washington, on 24 July 2024 (Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFP)

Hug the minorities in Britain and the US, and they become your most effective advocates and messengers. If these nations dealt with Muslims as they do with Jews, these communities would become their best ambassadors to the Muslim world - and the whole discourse across the region towards and against the West as an empty shell would change.

But stay on the current course of travel, and Starmer and Harris will only find themselves opening the gates of power to their nemeses.

The far right has only one idea, which grows in intensity and popularity each month. It is that the western world is in an existential civilisational fight, in which the Judeo-Christian world is fighting barbarism.

Israel is the front line of this global battle. If it loses, we all lose, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told both houses of Congress - by which he means, all whites lose. 

Anti-Muslim agenda

The centre left does nothing to fight this discourse. Quite the opposite- they embrace it, too. They, too, court Israel. They, too, are petrified of being branded antisemitic simply for upholding the human rights of Palestinians.

They, too, treat American and British Muslims in a radically different way from how they treat members of other faiths. And as the polling in each country shows only too clearly, this is having an effect on public attitudes, particularly among uneducated segments of the population. 

By shunning Muslims, Starmer is accommodating the anti-Muslim agenda. He is doing far-right leader Nigel Farage’s work for him.

UK riots: How the far-right movement became mainstream

Read More »

Starmer is making mainstream Farage’s views on Muslims as a potential fifth column in Britain, exactly as French President Emmanuel Macron did before him - and look what happened in France.

Nor will Starmer’s Britain be able to extricate itself from the fatal embrace of a far-right American president if Trump wins.

Robert O’Brien, one of the key security voices in Trump’s team, said Britain would risk “a serious rift” in its special relationship with the US if it goes ahead with a ban on arms sales to Israel. Starmer has already got the message.

By his actions, Starmer is inviting the far right onto the political stage - and when they get there, and Starmer is banished to the political shadows, all progressives, not least the Jewish citizens among them, will be the first to feel it. 

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He is a commentator and speaker on the region and analyst on Saudi Arabia. He was the Guardian's foreign leader writer, and was correspondent in Russia, Europe, and Belfast. He joined the Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/how-state-islamophobia-could-come-back-bite-west