A deradicalisation is long overdue – and not just to halt the West’s crimes against the people of Gaza and the wider Middle East region.
https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1975934683914342428
As the Gaza genocide has unfolded week after week, month after month – ever-more divorced from any link to 7 October 2023 – and western leaders have carried on justifying their inaction, a much deeper realisation is dawning.
This is not just about a demon unleashed among Israelis. It is about a demon in the soul of the West. It is us – the power bloc that established Israel, arms Israel, funds Israel, indulges Israel, excuses Israel – that really needs deradicalising.
Germany underwent a process of “denazification” following the end of the Second World War – a process, it is now clear from the German state’s feverish repression of any public opposition to the genocide in Gaza, that was never completed.
A far deeper campaign of deradicalisation than the one Nazi Germany was subjected to is now required in the West – one where normalising the murder of tens of thousands of children, live-streamed to our phones, can never be allowed to happen again.
A deradicalisation that would make it impossible to conceive of our own citizens travelling to Israel to help take part in the Gaza genocide, and then be welcomed back to their home countries with open arms.
A deradicalisation that would mean our governments could not contemplate silently abandoning their own citizens – citizens who joined an aid flotilla to try to break Israel’s illegal starvation-siege of Gaza – to the goons of Israel’s fascist police minister.
A deradicalisation that would make it inconceivable for British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, or other western leaders, to host Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, who at the outset of the slaughter in Gaza offered the central rationale for the genocide, arguing that no one there – not even its one million children – were innocent.
A deradicalisation that would make it self-evident to western governments that they must uphold the World Court’s ruling last year, not ignore it: that Israel must be forced to immediately end its decades-long illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories, and that they must carry out the arrest of Netanyahu on suspicion of crimes against humanity, as specified by the International Criminal Court.
A deradicalisation that would make it preposterous for Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s home secretary, to call demonstrations against a two-year genocide “fundamentally un-British” – or to propose ending the long-held right to protest, but only when the injustice is so glaring, the crime so unconscionable, that it leads people to repeatedly protest.
Mahmood justifies this near-death-knell erosion of the right to protest on the grounds that regular protests have a “cumulative impact”. She is right. They do: by exposing as a sham our government’s claim to stand for human rights, and to represent anything more than naked, might-is-right politics.
A deradicalisation is long overdue – and not just to halt the West’s crimes against the people of Gaza and the wider Middle East region.
Already, as our leaders normalise their crimes abroad, they are normalising related crimes at home. The first signs are in the designation of opposition to genocide as “hate”, and of practical efforts to stop the genocide as “terrorism”.
The intensifying campaign of demonisation will grow, as will the crackdown on fundamental and long-cherished rights.
Israel has declared war on the Palestinian people. And our leaders are slowly declaring war on us, whether it be those protesting the Gaza genocide, or those opposed to a consumption-driven West’s genocide of the planet.
We are being isolated, smeared and threatened. Now is the time to stand together before it is too late. Now is the time to find your voice.
This is an extract from my latest article Genocide two years on: It is the West, not Gaza, that must be deradicalised. Find a link to the article in the next post 
posted by Satish Sharma at
04:30
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