Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Month: August 2021

Slaughter

24.08.2021 /

A few hours ago the Israeli military butchered a fifteen year old unarmed Palestinian. This is the 12th child on the West Bank killed by Israeli soldiers so far this year.

On 13 August the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UN Human Rights) (OHCHR), wrote:

From the start of the year until the end of July 2021, Israeli military forces have killed 11 Palestinian children in the West Bank. This is more than the recorded deaths of Palestinian children under the occupation in all of 2020. As well, a reported 67 Palestinian children were killed in Gaza during the violence of May 2021.

Moreover, the OHCHR substantiates that the Israeli authorities will balk at nothing in order to prevent the truth from being known, even to its own citizens:

UN human rights experts have called on the Government of Israel to immediately return confidential documents and office equipment that its military seized from the offices of Defense for Children International-Palestine (DCIP) in Al-Bireh, in the occupied West Bank.

…

In recent years, DCIP has critically and reliably reported on the patterns of arrests, maiming and killings of Palestinian children by the Israeli military in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza. The silencing or hindering of these activities violates the fundamental human rights of expression and association, which Israel has committed itself to uphold through its ratification of the two 1966 International Covenants.

It is high time that the governments of the EU, the EEA, the UK and the US make it clear that no country that so blatantly disregards human rights can be considered an ally. By failing to do so the said governments will have been accessories before, during and after the facts, to heinous crimes against humanity that have been going on for decades. By failing to do so, they are, in fact, no better than the non-Western countries they so love to ridicule and denounce.

“Inaccurate and even fraudulent reporting”

11.08.2021 /

If Trump said that, it must be wrong, right? Wrong. (Alas, when will we learn that even our enemies may occasionally have a point?)

Even the New York Times, even the Washington Post and even the Guardian and Le Monde need sponsors, sponsors with large purses, very large purses, people like Jeff Bezos. I bet Jeff Bezos is a Washington Post sponsor…

Hold on! The Washington Post is actually OWNED by Jeff Bezos, you know the guy behind Amazon (a company where employees are afraid they’ll get sacked if they have to go to the loo). Put it this way: Jeff Bezos would not be someone I would like to work for. I would not vote for him in any political context. I would not want my children to have anything to do with him or his offspring or his companies. You see, my theory is: Tell me what company you own and/or run, and I will tell you who you are.

So do I trust the Washington Post?

Jeff Bezos took a little ride into space the other day. Good for him. It must have been fun. I don’t like the way he makes his money (by treating employees like machines), but I don’t care how he spends his leisure time. What I do resent, however, is that according to Aljazeera’s Listening Post, the CBS Morning News Show devoted no less than 212 minutes to Jeff Bezos after his space jaunt, “almost as much” as the show had devoted to climate change over the entire past year. (So I certainly don’t trust CBS.)

Now, do I trust Aljazeera? Of course not. Aljazeera, too, is owned by somebody, the King of Qatar, I gather. Working conditions are no better in Qatar than at Amazon (possibly no worse either). My point being: Aljazeera and the Washington Post are both news outlets that pride themselves on delivering top-of-the-shelf, intrepid journalism. They are very important sources.

Sources of their calibre hate peddling outright falsehoods. Deceit, however, takes many forms, as we know, one of them being silence. What is not said is as rhetorically forceful as what is said. In my previous post I wrote of the Israeli Pegasus spy-ware. The Listening Post on Aljazeera, a program I warmly recommend because, as they say, “we don’t cover the news, we cover how the news is covered”, said not a word about how the spy-ware is used in so-called Democratic countries. Not a word.

But they did discuss the role played by the German Springer tabloid “Bild” in German politics. Very interesting, that. Very reminiscent, indeed, of the role played by the Washington Post and Fox News in US politics.

Meanwhile, I find myself wondering whether Jeff Bezos intends to try to run for president. (As you see, my distrust of the man is visceral.) There is something vaguely megalomaniacal about the man’s “visions” for us earthlings in space. Maybe I am reading the wrong text? Maybe the man is merely grieving, as I grieve, about the fate of humans all over the globe, about animals, and plants – species, no less, many of which have been eradicated in the course of just a decade. Is he mad enough to imagine that he will save humanity? Or is he merely planning his own and his friends and family’s escape to another planet?

Let’s forget about whatchamacallit Bezos! We are, after all, marching now, inexorably, towards something that hardly bears thinking about. Let us NOT forget, though, that beauty still exists and will always exist in one form or another no matter what happens to our planet and the species that inhabit it. Listen to Ravel’s Bolero, for instance, to the music’s sore-footed, determined march towards a somewhere “over the rainbow”, which inevitably, again and again, turns out to be way past the horizon for the refugees, say, or the elephants and zebras and squirrels – just a trickle of them at first , then more and more, and more…

Poor consolation, perhaps, but: There will always be music, always be glorious sunsets, always be stories told at dusk. And there will always be acts of generosity and solidarity and simple kindnesses that warm a frightened heart.

For years, even the most excellent sources of top-notch journalism have been evasive about climate change. When will they do their job? Or to put it differently: When will their sponsors allow them to do their job? Will they ever? Or will theys just rely on Jeff Bezos getting them away from a ruined planet to continue their business of getting rich on Mars?

What the rest of us need to know is how to respond to climate change. We don’t just need warnings. We need – let’s face it – a revolution, an inter-disciplinary, knowledged-based revolution.

I envisage the empowering of marine biologists, meteorologists, entomologists, agronomists, epidemiologists, anthropologists and of social scientists of every order, economists, psychologists, etc., etc. in every country in the world and from every economic echelon. Not just them, their students too. At the local level I envisage citizens being invited to discuss, in every municipality: HOW DO WE DEAL WITH THIS?

This would all of course entail a certain amount of chaos, so some rules of engagement would have to be established, and I certainly don’t know what rules, but I want to be asked. I want all of us to be asked! These are times of urgency and urgent measure are needed.

I leave you here. For now. THINK. THINK HARD.

Whiteness

08.08.2021 /

The winged snow-white horse Pegasus was the offshoot of a Gorgon, Medusa (the lady whose hair consisted of vipers). Since he now resides among the stars in the sky (the great square of Pegasus), we may have forgotten what his mother was. But we have recently been told that he now also resides in an unknown number of mobile phones.

Mainstream media have made a big fuss about the Pegasus spyware issue. Indeed, the issue merits a rumpus, but just what have the Guardian, the Washington Post, Le Monde and BBC been saying about it? If you open the links, you will see that the articles are near identical.

This is the take of all the articles linked above: Israel has been naughty because it has been selling cutting-edge spyware to countries that regard political opponents, journalists and human rights activists as terrorists.

The journalists have discovered that everywhere Netanyahu went, Pegasus went too, as in the nursery rhyme:

Mary had a little lamb,
Its fleece was white as snow,
And every where that Mary went,
The lamb was sure to go

Put differently, Netanyahu was on an ingratiation spree, offering Pegasus to his hosts. Since time immemorial people have brought gifts when they went a-visiting. I am sure that offering a beautiful white horse was not uncommon in the Middle East.

Somebody joined the dots and found that Kashogi was killed shortly after Netanyahu’s visit to Saudi Arabia and that Pegasus had been lodged in the phones of several of his closest contacts. This effectively indicates that Israel might have been accessory to Kashogi’s death. But then again, Israel maintains that the country is perpetually at war, and that collateral damage is therefore unavoidable. For my part, I have never had the impression that loss of non-Jewish lives worries Israeli authorities, so this is not “news”.

Now you will not often catch me defending Israel, and strictly speaking I shall not do so now either, except by pointing out one small detail: selling weapons and drones (and other devices that disseminate death and despair) to any country that is willing to pay is not normally the stuff headlines are made of. It is what most countries do on a regular basis. I mean, honestly, our so-called democratic countries doing business with murderous dictators is what keeps those dictators afloat. Not that I defend such practices, but the press is distorting the Pegasus spyware issue. Israel is merely doing what most other countries do.

The problem about Pegasus is not that Israel has been naughty, but that Pegasus exists at all. When your mother is so hideous to behold that you are struck dead from just a glimpse of her, no wonder you turn into an instrument of evil. Pegasus is an example of scientific advances that are detrimental to the future of mankind. I quote Edward Snowden as quoted by the Guardian:

“for traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect’s phone, law enforcement would need to “break into somebody’s house, or go to their car, or go to their office, and we’d like to think they’ll probably get a warrant”. But commercial spyware made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. “If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who’s even marginally of interest,” he said. “If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.”

These are, I repeat, Snowden’s words, not the Guardian’s. Snowden is, you will remember, already a fugitive because he spoke out about the massive unconstitutional surveillance being conducted by NSA against his country’s citizens. The Guardian’s reporters are perhaps not willing to risk everything, as did Snowden, by broadcasting what the existence of Pegasus actually means for the future of news reporting.

Nor do the above linked articles even hint at how so-called democratic countries to whom Israel has sold Pegasus – including the countries home to the Guardian, Washington Post, Le Monde and BBC – how those countries use the spyware. Do the said countries’ legislators even know it is being used? Are the courts duly informed each time a subject is subjected to the most invasive surveillance known to history?

I put to you that the journalists writing the near identical stories in the above linked articles will have been near paralysed. Petrified. I put to you that they are asking themselves whether Pegasus has already been stabled in their phones.

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