Greta Thunberg, in a video posted on social media, said she and other members of the Freedom flotilla en-route to Gaza have been kidnapped by Israeli forces. This comes after the Daily Mail reported that several Israeli vessels surrounded the ship Madleen, prompting the crew to raise an alarm.
Thunberg shared a pre-recorded video appealing for international help. “My name is Greta Thunberg, and I am from Sweden,” she said in the clip. “If you see this video, we are being intercepted and kidnapped in international waters by the Israeli occupational forces, or forces that support Israel. I urge all my friends, family and comrades to put pressure on the Swedish government to release me and the others as soon as possible.”
Why is everyone so hands off and permissive with Israel? Like they can do nothing wrong when they go out of their way to do wrong things?
Israel has a huge lobby in most Western countries. And Epstein material on their politicians.
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/jeffrey-epstein-steven-hoffenberg-intelligence-agencies-spy-1197708/
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It does but the lobby wouldn’t be allowed to exist if Isntreal weren’t a useful tool for the US-aligned empire. The lobby is a how, not a why.
I don’t think Epstein dirt is that powerful. We live in a post-truth time. Powerful men have been getting away withremoved kids for a long time, see Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin for a less political example.
So why doesn’t Trump pick up the phone and tell Netanyahu to stop the genocide?
Because that’s not in the US empire’s interests
… How is this in their interest?
https://hexbear.net/comment/6223363
Isntreal is a military base masquerading as a country.
So explain why Biden and Trump don’t tell Israel to stop the genocide instead of destroying the entire ‘rules based order’.
Bro what? Have you not read anything in this thread?
For Germany: Israel is an indulgence for the Holocaust.
For the USA: Israel is an unsinkable aircraft carrier in a largely hostile region that is protected by international law.
For the rest of Western Europe: They are vassals of the US, so naturally they don’t want to piss of their daddy.
For everyone else: they don’t want to provoke the US either.
Don’t forget that the rest of Europe benefits from the imperialist projection in the same ways as the US does.
That should go without saying.
It should but people love giving Europe a pass whenever they can for some reason.
Literally this. This should never be left unsaid, actually it should be underscored.
This makes the most sense.
it should be fairly obvious to everyone by now. Israel is an extension of the US, their unsinkable aircraft carrier in the middle east, or as Biden put it “if israel didn’t exists, we would have to invent it to protect our interests in the region.”
also it’s fairly obvious that the “rules based order” is nothing more than a “might makes right order” enforced by the US.
Israel has hit bourgeois internationalism with a sledgehammer, it’s actually interesting to see. Even in the war of Ukraine, the libs using that as an argument to oppose Russia with, have basically dropped that talking point in late 2023.
Biden is the top AIPAC recipient.
The aircraft carrier story is nothing more than a cheap excuse. The real reason US politicians support Israel is because of the AIPAC lobby bribing them and the Epstein tapes they are on.
You really need to let this go. US imperialism is not a “cheap excuse,” nor are Christian Zionists. Every time you dismiss the hegemonic US’ agency and falsely lay all the blame on Israel, you’re feeding into antisemitic tropes.
It’s simultaneously:
The U.S. is predominantly running the show, but Israel has agency too, and its state policy involves filtering out U.S. politicians who might oppose its interests as early as possible. This includes a massive amount of pro-Israel propaganda intended for mainstream consumption, harassing professors at colleges, etc.
Nope. If anything people should have been completely convinced by now that I am right over the past 20 months. The ‘aircraft carrier’ is the cheap excuse from the same guy who destroyed the US global reputation so Israel can do genocide.
Are we watching the US and Europe destroying their entire reputation so Israel can do a genocide or not? Nobody can explain this away with convenience factor. This genocide is in no way beneficial to the empire.
Christian Zionists such as Genocide Joe are indeed also a reason this is happening, but they too do not support Israel for any pragmatic cause which would benefit the empire such as being an aircraft carrier.
Countries such as Egypt, UAE and Saudi are infinitely more obedient than Israel which does things like the USS liberty and selling American secrets to Russia.
There are hundreds of explanations, from crushing armed resistance to prevent other movements from arising, to showing military might so other nations don’t get any ideas, to being a bandaid to the property crisis in the West, to further increase MIC sales, to just being a blunder, etc…
The American hegemony runs on soft power and American exceptionalism. Showing other nations that they can… starve women and children in a concentration camp… is not what I would call a “great showing of might”.
Even the MIC sales in Gaza are not that huge. Ukraine is making the MIC tonnes more money while the Western hegemony fully believes it is doing the right thing.
Gaza is the dumbest and least significant hill to die on for the empire. But it dead set to die on it.
US hegemony runs of military might and financial might, not soft power ffs. There is a reason to the thousands of US military bases all around the world yk.
No the US empire has many ties with other countries in order to allow their bases to be there.
USAID and all the other mass propaganda outlets and mainstream news networks have a purpose. Whitewash the empire.
If you are on Lemmygrad, that should be known to you.
Also, the empire just took the L from the Taliban. So in terms of hard power, nobody is really impressed anyways. A show of hard power would be if they got Ukraine to win the war. Not a genocide against women and children lmao
They want the Gaza Marine Gas field. They don’t want the financial risk of the Palestinian people attacking the facilities and transportation.
Then they would have cleansed all the Palestinians into Egypt at the start.
There is nothing worse for the reputation of Israel and the West than getting these types of headlines every single day because they had to be literal cartoon villains and shoot 30 Palestinians trying to find food at an aid point.
If this ends with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, which it might, doing it at day 600 instead of day 30 makes absolutely no sense.
It is not the negative news, but the repetition of negative news which sticks in people’s heads.
Biden pushed for the mass displacement option early on, but Egypt, Jordan and other regional actors refused, just like they have so far under Trump.
Nah this is not the hill you should be dying on. This is literally ahistorical non materialist analysis with a dose of antisemitism.
Where do you think the Israel lobby gets its funding lmao.
Do you mean governments or people?
People don’t have much power here. Other than boycotts, what can people do?
For governments, Israel is fairly powerful. They have powerful lobbyists, and aren’t shy to leverage claims of antisemitism against anybody who speaks up against Israel. In many cases, there’s also the guilt over how jews were treated in WWII. This is one reason Germany is so incredibly pro-Israel. Then there’s the fact that Israel is still more-or-less a democracy, which makes it unique in the middle east. It’s the one country in the region pushing back against various Islamic fundamentalist goverments, movements and terrorist groups. Many countries don’t want to lose that “friend”.
And then there’s spyware. Most of the best spyware in the world is produced in Israel. Some cynical people would say that countries don’t want to lose access to the world’s best producer of spyware. Some even more cynical people would say that that spyware has already been used on politicians and Israel is using it for blackmail. Who knows what the right level of cynicism is.
How many are still alive? That excuse has long expired.
You can thank the CIA for that.
It’s not individual guilt, it’s institutional guilt. In many other cases that’s a good thing. We want German kids to grow up learning about the holocaust and thinking “we can’t allow that to ever happen again”. I don’t think what’s happening in Gaza could happen in Germany because of what Germans are taught growing up.
OTOH, in Israel they seem to only be taught that jews are victims and can never be perpetrators.
Yeah, they were involved. They were saving the world from the dangers of communism. Looking back, all the west really had to do was sit back and wait for the communist system to collapse. But, I wonder what the middle east would look like without the CIA’s interference. It sure seems unlikely it would be a land of healthy, stable democracies. Look at all the places where the CIA didn’t interfere. Countries ruled by strongmen is the rule rather than the exception.
But, however we got here, that has been Israel’s traditional role. It was a democratic country with somewhat similar values to the west, nestled among Islamic Arab countries with very different values.
I think they kind of overdid it 'cos know they activelly defend nazis…
Don’t forget that Epstein was linked to Israel Military intelligence, so there is that…
manufactured consent and capitalist profit. it’s a cult.
Western Kabuki
Old colonial power just became neo colonial powers.
Western countries never face any consequences for their atrocities.
Because if you criticise you’re called “Anti Semitic”
BS. Those countries doesn’t care about being labeled antisemite they are racist toward palestinians
We just need to help god make the book of revelations happen so Jesus can come back!
/s
Greed.
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please i beg you to stop making the US seem as the victim when they’re the top dog.
This is a complete inversion of the relationship and a very loud antisemitic dog whistle
While their statement is a hyperbolic and reductive statement about only the other side of the symbiotic relationship, we must also not strip Israel of its agency. Also, Israel≠Jews, as much as Israel tries to convince you they are the same.
In the macro scale. Yes, Israel is propped up by the west as a powerful tool against other regional powers and the imperial system funnels funds into their upkeep.
But it’s also true that in the micro scale. Politicians are more directly and personally rewarded to keep those funds flowing (AIPAC exists regardless of tropes) and Israel uses the leverage they have as one of the more valuable strategic tools to grant them leeway others wouldn’t have.
It’s a two way street. Israel and The US/west aren’t parasites leeching off one or the other, they’re symbiotic.
Sure, there’s a two-way relationship, but the US is the global hegemon (or at least was until very recently), while Israel is a regional power. They may both influence each other, but the US has more say in the relationship.
great job hiding the “jews control everything” slander.
Replace jew/Israel with zionist if it helps you. It’s more accurate anyway.
Do you like having a job and a place to live? That’s why.