It’s been a good few weeks for pro-Palestine supporters, starting with a murder in New York.
Erin Piacenti was a 32-year old Bank of America vice President and a new mother who was stabbed by a mad woman. Her murder was celebrated by the pro-Palestine elites, one being the Oscar-nominated Lexi Alexander, who cheered it as the spirit of Luigi Mangione. Mangione had killed an innocent man (United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson) also in New York, for which he has now pleaded guilty.
There are differences between Erin’s killer – Pamela Cisneros – and Luigi, the most obvious being that Pamela was awfully big – so large that the tasers made no difference, forcing an African American policeman to unload his sidearm on her. I’m with mental health campaigners who complain about asylums being shuttered. Good old padded walls and shock therapies have been replaced by social workers playing on Tik Tok, shoving fistfuls of anti-depressants into their patient’s mouths. Evidently this makes you hungry, and Pamela was well on her way to melting into an already collapsed sofa, suffocating a pet or the fire department taking a wrecking ball to her roof so they could evacuate her to hospital.
Anyway, Pamela made the pro-Palestinians happy, which was nice of her.
Litigating the Israel / Gaza / West Bank-settler quandary is every right-on boomer’s favourite sport. More interesting are the consequences of conceding – what prizes the weak, English-speaking, soft-left are winning for this kind of thing.
Explanations vary as to why the UK government announced sanctions on Israel, ranging from an inherent dislike of Jews now rampant across the Labour, Green and Liberal Democrat parties, to the possibility that the party was coerced by Mark Carney and other European leaders as they attempt to establish a non-US route to a new ‘international order’, or the most likely – the need for the Labour party to curry favour with its Muslim quarters. Keir Starmer, a man who said he’d never resign his seat, has just resigned his seat, and his party would really like to fill it with one of their own, in this case a Muslim woman who was born in Somalia.
The sanctions have thrilled the pro-Palestinians, as did the recognition of Palestinian statehood by the Yookay last year. Perhaps Ed Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, is aware that some states in America have anti-boycott, sanctions and divestment (BDS) policies, meaning that financial institutions based in Florida would be legally obliged to yank their cash from the City of London’s pension funds. Perhaps he feels that despite the Yookay being one of Florida’s largest foreign investors and the tens of thousands of jobs this supports, he can weather the reflex. Ed isn’t famous for his intelligence, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt here.
That ends at the one calculation he definitely hasn’t made, which looks to his own society, and the contagion of more.
There is a case study. When the BLM scam exploded in America, the Yookay kneeled before these forces with commissions, investigations, panels, fines and financial commitments totaling tens, possibly hundreds of millions of pounds. Why this was happening was obvious: the country wanted to cover its tracks, appear to be extra compassionate, avoid race riots etc. Did it work?
Well, no. Nobody saw the country as more or less ‘racist’ – because nobody saw the country as ‘racist’ to begin with. It wasn’t rewarded, nobody copied its strategy. More than anything else, the behaviour of politicians, captains of industry and the heads of civil service was interpreted as creepy and inauthentic.
One of the highlights of this pandering extravaganza was Boris Johnson instituting an investigation to find out whether his country was racist. When the overwhelmingly black panel who did the investigating returned with a report concluding they couldn’t find any racism, they were met with fury from white Lib Dem voters and Labour Londoners: ‘so where the f*** is it then? You were supposed to find it!’
But what it did do was embolden the reparations grifters. Suddenly telephone numbers were being thrown about as totals for compensation for country’s role in the slave trade. Entertaining these chancers disfigured real history – the role the country had played defeating the trade, leading to processions representing Caribbean nations rocking up in London and demanding to see the King, hoping to squeeze a cheque out of him.
The announcement of the sanctions saw support from the white middle class who feel Israel needs a bloody nose. Are pro-Palestinians grateful to these groups for their endorsement? No. Palestine, to the vast majority of its supporters across English speaking nations, is not about Palestine, but the one grievance to rule or link all others, a stalking horse to the cratering of western society and its routines, in particular capitalism. They could not be clearer: from the apparently senseless execution of two young Jews in Washington last year, to the unpoliced intentions expressed during London’s protests and the celebration of any murder or natural disaster as vengeance, the Yookay establishment has once more failed to believe people when those people have told them exactly who they are.
Performative theatre is no substitute for intelligent diplomacy, but Tuesday’s announcement feels like the beginning of a political snuff movie. You have possibly the most underperforming, thick, unworldly and attention-craving generation of lawmakers in history. Then you have a group of serious people who have expressed their intentions in no uncertain terms, who do not speak in the language of coalition or alliance, who have no real interest in peace or cohesion.
Where does it stop? That’s the point. It doesn’t.
[Image: Free Palestine protest UK]
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