The media was wrong when they said Israel bombed the Al Ahli Hospital.They were wrong for repeating the Gaza health ministry claim that Gaza deaths were "70% women and children."They were wrong when they reported that 10,000 bodies were buried under the rubble.They were wrong when they said the Gaza hospitals had no terrorists.They were wrong when they repeated absurd claims that 186,000 Gazans had died.They were wrong when they said Hamas was not stealing aid.They were wrong for saying that Gaza was in the midst of a famine.They were wrong for repeating the "genocide" claims without rebuttal.They were wrong for doubting everything the IDF said and giving credence to everything Hamas said.They are wrong for not admitting that they have been consistently, constantly wrong about every aspect of the Gaza war.All of their mistakes have been in the same direction - accusing Jews of being inhumane monsters.Why, exactly, should anyone believe the mainstream media about Israel, ever?
Of all the untranslatable words in the Russian language, my favorite is пошлость— poshlost—representing a concept that is ubiquitous, albeit unacknowledged, in the modern Western world. It’s untranslatable because it can’t be summed up in a single word and stands instead for a great many interrelated concepts. But if, in an effort to understand it, one were to dissect poshlost, one would find inside it, wriggling like little worms, the words “smarmy,” “smug,” “superficial,” and “shabby.”And yet, squirmy as this image is, that’s only half of what’s inside poshlost, because entangled with the first set of meanings is a second set: “self-importance,” “imaginary virtue,” “oblivious narcissism,” “belligerent weepiness,” and “preening self-regard.”“It is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” as Vladimir Nabokov put it. It’s the mistaken belief, Nabokov continued, “that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.” A literary critic who wrote on Nabokov’s work described the word as “petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity.”And what is the “acme of human happiness” for these self-satisfied vulgarians? In the contemporary Western context, and particularly among university students and the intelligentsia, it is the feeling that you are better, more virtuous, and more deeply human than most of the mean-spirited, seething, insensible masses around you.Which brings us, of course, to the most repellent example of poshlost in the modern world: the thin veneer of ersatz humanitarianism and pathos that Western intellectuals splotch across the nakedly hateful reality of Islamist supremacist rhetoric and violence.
There are ....syrupy emoji assemblages that feature the Palestinian flag, accompanied by one or more of the following: a bright red heart, a white dove of peace, a rainbow, a unicorn, an LGBTQ+ flag, and, of course, a watermelon, often accompanied by a fundraising link for the families of Gaza (though said funds will likely never get further than a Hamas bank account in a place like Qatar, but hey, it’s the thought that counts!).Often, there is a “land acknowledgment” in the bio—a reference to, for example, “Syilx Okanagan stolen land.” This is a confession that the poster lives on land conquered from its indigenous inhabitants; it’s deployed as a means of expiating guilt while preempting charges of hypocrisy. Needless to say, the poster has no intention of actually moving from the conquered land, thereby reinforcing the very hypocrisy he wishes to avoid. People post these acknowledgments of theft only because they are secure in the knowledge that the indigenous people on whose land they live will not rape them, burn them alive, or behead them. In their minds, the payment for this privilege is merely a nickel inserted into an imaginary vending machine that dispenses virtue.
"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024) PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022) |
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