If a Pulitzer Prize was handed out for the (unintentionally) funniest, stitch-inducing headline drafted by a “main” information organisation in 2024, then The New York Occasions – which craves such frivolous baubles – would win it with out query.
Right here’s the “award-winning” headline, printed final week within the aftermath of US President-elect Donald Trump’s diplomatic alternatives that, in response to the Occasions, will “assist form President-elect Trump’s technique” on the Center East.
“Trump’s Center East Picks Sign Staunch Professional-Israel Coverage,” the Occasions wrote.
It’s simply so comical, isn’t it?
An similar headline may have been recycled verbatim after each Democrat or Republican president-elect made public his “Center East picks” since Israel’s engineered inception in 1948.
My goodness.
The headline’s implicit suggestion is that, in some way, for some puzzling motive, there could have been a scintilla of doubt that Trump was not going to undertake a “Staunch Professional-Israel Coverage” like all his deferential predecessors.
Certain, Trump performed nicey-nicey with a bunch of gullible Arab “leaders” (pawns) in swing-state Michigan through the presidential election marketing campaign to curry fleeting favour with a “neighborhood” he would instantly abandon as soon as he scored 270 electoral votes.
The headline’s second underlying inference is that any US president-elect – Democrat or Republican – would take into account, not to mention be able to, embracing something aside from a “Staunch Professional-Israel Coverage”.
Lastly, and maybe most absurdly, in its ongoing and signature efforts to normalise a fascist president-elect, the Occasions’s uproarious headline and sub-headline indicate that Trump, who will quickly occupy the Oval Workplace for a second time, has a nuanced understanding of the Center East that may translate right into a well-defined “coverage” and “technique” for the area.
My goodness – the sequel.
This can be a revelation to the Occasions, however I don’t assume that Trump may even distinguish between Iran and Iraq on a map.
However, as we all know, a nuanced understanding of the Center East just isn’t essentially a prerequisite within the White Home or the State Division, in the case of electing or appointing individuals to take carriage of America’s “coverage” or “technique” for that troubled a part of the world.
Do the discredited names George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice and the late Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell spring to anybody’s thoughts – significantly on the complicit New York Occasions?
Lest we overlook.
Predictably, Joe Biden and Antony Blinken adopted the “shock and awe” gang’s ruinous footprints by giving the indicted prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, all the cash, arms, and “strategic” cowl he required to commit genocide in Gaza and the occupied West Financial institution.
Biden, Blinken and United Nations Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield have pursued the identical “kill first, assume later” “coverage” or “technique” – take your choose – that the “shock and awe” gang employed with such disastrous and inhumane penalties.
You’d have fairly thought that the calamitous invasion of Iraq would have given Biden, Blinken and Thomas-Greenfield pause.
You’d be fallacious.
As a substitute, true to “kill first, assume later” type, Biden, Blinken and Thomas-Greenfield have enabled a genocide – that has already claimed the lives of greater than 43,000 Palestinians, principally youngsters and girls – with the patina of fake seriousness that Trump and halting firm lack and that’s so valued by the realized cognoscenti on the Occasions, CNN and MSNBC.
So, why anybody, anyplace, can be “shocked” that Trump has chosen an evangelical Christian and wannabe rampaging Israeli settler, Mike Huckabee, to be America’s subsequent ambassador to Israel is a foolish thriller to me.
Why anybody, anyplace can be “shocked” that pro-Israel zealots like Senator Marco Rubio and Consultant Elise Stefanik can be appointed secretary of state and UN ambassador respectively can be a foolish thriller to me.
Like Biden, Blinken, and Thomas-Greenfield, Trump, Rubio, Huckabee and Stefanik consider that Israel enjoys absolutely the, uncontested “proper to defend itself”. If which means the erasure of Gaza and the West Financial institution, then so be it — decency, human and civil rights conventions, and worldwide regulation be damned.
Past the rhetorical edges a couple of legendary “two-state resolution”, there isn’t any “daylight” between Biden, Blinken, and Thomas-Greenfield and Trump, Rubio, Huckabee and Stefanik regarding the “future” of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Financial institution.
They don’t have any “future”.
Biden, Blinken, and Thomas-Greenfield have permitted Israel to do to Gaza and the West Financial institution what Trump, Rubio, Huckabee and Stefanik have lengthy hoped to do to Gaza and the West Financial institution – flip what stays of Palestinian land into mud and reminiscence by, if want be, deadly and indiscriminate pressure.
Trump, Rubio, Huckabee and Stefanik symbolize the marginally extra blunt and profane continuum of America’s defining “kill first, assume later” angle in direction of the Center East.
That’s the reason Democrats’ and the cognoscenti’s fuming “outrage” over Trump’s “scandalous” cupboard and different high-profile administration selections has been largely reserved – shock, shock – for his “controversial” picks for legal professional normal and defence secretary.
The methodical, greater than yearlong destruction of Gaza and the West Financial institution is stale information.
Biden, Blinken and Thomas-Greenfield gave Israel the “inexperienced gentle” to kill as many Palestinians because it needs to for so long as it needs to and Trump, Rubio, Huckabee and Stefanik will do exactly the identical.
On genocide: the brand new White Home gang is similar because the previous White Home gang.
Maintain on. There’s nonetheless hope. The Arab leaders (pawns) who met with Trump in direction of the top of the marketing campaign – in rebuff of Kamala Harris – have despatched him a letter asking the president-elect “to use [his] political affect in demanding an instantaneous ceasefire in Lebanon and Palestine” with a view in direction of negotiating “an enduring peace”.
After all, a letter – assuming Trump bothers to learn it – is sure to vary Washington’s ingrained view that Palestinians are all the time the perpetrators and by no means the victims, and that their lives are as disposable as they’re inconsequential.
Sure, a pretty-please-worded letter ought to lastly do the elusive trick.
The views expressed on this article are the creator’s personal and don’t essentially mirror Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.