jmoiron.net

A few days ago, as we rode home from Japanese Class on the 126 bus, I was speaking to ceache about the current situation in the middle east, and what it has to do with the history of the region and the history elsewhere. I drew heavily upon material learned from various sources, but particularly unsettling was the conclusion of the conversation.

The world really isn't all that far from World War III right now. We might be in it right now, but that depends on the future. Nobody said "Oh shit, World War I." when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was gunned down, and although times have changed and pulpits are surely more numerous (and soothsayers more audacious), not many people are saying "Oh shit, World War III." today. But if they were, they'd be thinking "Gilad Shalit" and not Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The interesting part is why.

June 24th, 2006. The IDF invades Gaza and arrests Osama and Mustafa abu Muammar. The event isn't exactly a shot heard 'round the world. Although Agence France-Presse, one of the world's largest news wire services, pushes a story about it, it falls largely through the cracks. The next day, cpl. Gilad Shalit is kidnapped and a bloody retaliation ensues. This of course is widely reported, not as retaliation but as some unexplainable move made by a terrorist organization. As you can see, the Muammar incident essentially does not exist in western literature.

I've read a lot of Finklestein lately, and what he says largely rings true to me. His two basic theories (provided with copious well-researched documentation) are in a nutshell:

The Holocaust is something bears no connection with the historic event the Nazi Holocaust, and is a tool by which a circle of wealthy jews in the west deflect critizism of Israel and elicit funds from governments to spread zionism. Central to The Holocaust Industry's claims is that the Nazi Holocaust was unique, that jews suffered uniquely during it, and that they are uniquely entitled to reparations.

This same circle of wealthy western jews deflect criticism of Israel through the invocation of "anti-semitism". A corrolary is that "anti-semitism" is inherently irrational, rather than a reaction to the behavior of the state of Israel or the wealthy jewish organizations belonging to The Holocaust industry.

If you think that such findings are baselessly cruel, I implore you to read some of his work and determine their validity after witnessing the surgical way in which he goes about proving his theses.

In any case, both the coverage of the Shalit story and the recent Hezbollah attacks have elicited no media attention to the first kidnapping (I myself only learned of it through an interview of chomsky's on democracy now, and apparently i'm not alone). In fact, it has mostly fallen in line with Chomsky's propaganda model, and whats more much of the justification for Israel's actions has fallen in line with what Finklestein cites as 'typical deflection'.

The scenario that ceache and I were talking about involved a simultaneous escalation of the Middle Eastern Conflict (the introduction of Israel (nukes) and Iran into the 2 extant conflicts) and of the North Korea standoff. In this situation, the United States and United Nations would be spread far and wide, and the escalation of two other high-tense low-coverage situations would not be too hard to imagine: China opportunistically plucking Taiwan and adding a notch to their belt of "historically our territory" imperialism, or the conflict in Kashmir which hasn't been as chic in recent years and somehow escaped coverage even as hundreds were killed by bomb in Mumbai.

Either one of those ancillary conditions would by themselves garnered extreme ammounts of dread in years past, but in "this post 9/11 world" where baseball is more important than the fate of our 100,000+ troops involved in 2 bloody occupations, they seem somewhat diminuitive to the escalation occuring in Israel and North Korea. (Indeed, the Kashmir struggle has been on top of everyones World War III prediction lists since both countries went nuclear) It just shows how sadly jaded we are that these are merely straws to break a camels back in the epic piles of war we've recently erected.