There are videos and blog posts I can write and publish without spending much time thinking about the risks involved. Yesterday‘s video, in which I described Israel as a rogue state and called for sanctions upon it, was not one of those.
This video was the result of much prior thought and planning. The first take was subject to vetting before we even moved to an edit, just to make sure that nothing I said could be interpreted as antisemitic, except by those who think that criticism of Israel is antisemitic, which is, of course, an antisemitic claim in its own right.
Then I had to consider the possibility of backlash and the commercial risk.
I decided to go ahead anyway, because in my opinion, it was the right time to say what I thought was necessary.
Those who excuse Israeli genocide and its abuse of human rights, as well as its war crimes, did, of course, turn up here. I posted and responded to those who posted less extreme comments. Those who posted profoundly offensively were deleted.
What I was, however, surprised by was the reaction to the polls that I posted, both here and on YouTube.
This was the result of the poll here:
Rarely has there been a result quite as clear as that one.
On YouTube, the result was a little less emphatic, but that is what I would have expected. It was, however, still overwhelmingly in favour of sanctions, and do note the number of people who voted. 21,500 did, which is almost as many as viewed the video.
Talking of direct reactions to the video, of those who chose to register an opinion, 98 per cent indicated that they liked it, which is a higher than normal percentage, but what was particularly notable was that the proportion of those indicating a choice was itself very high. My video, posted on Saturday on the risk of the financial crash, was very popular, as the following data shows, but the proportion of those offering an opinion on liking, or disliking it, was 2.75% per cent, whereas the proportion offering an opinion on the Israeli sanctions video was 16.7% per cent, which was exceptional.
My conclusion is very clear. People have had enough of the idea that Israel is somehow “different“ to the rest of the world and that the standards of conduct expected of it also differ, meaning that its aggression might be tolerated. Well over two years of such aggression, with tens of thousands of innocent lives being lost as a consequence, and the global disruption resulting, have changed people's views on this issue, and quite rightly so. Israel is now seen as a state like any other, as it should be. And in that context, what is very clear is that its conduct is utterly unacceptable and abusive, and people have had enough of that.
There is nothing antisemitic about this sentiment. When making these observations, I am only discussing the conduct of the Israeli government, whose actions I condemn, just as much as I have condemned the actions of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran when they too have committed war crimes and failed to respect human rights. There is no duality here, and there is no prejudice.
What, in fact, is on display is commonality. Human beings must be judged by their actions and should be condemned when they are abusive, and the states that engage in such actions should be sanctioned. I was pleased to find agreement on these issues.
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I did vote yesterday but did not comment – you said it all really and I can only agree 100%.
Everything the Israeli government does is strangely redolent of previous governments who have acted in self justified ‘self defence’.
Having said that, it must also be accepted that the current Israeli government does not represent all Jewish perspectives in the way it conducts its business.
You were pretty brave saying what you said and were extremely polite the way you said it, considering the magnitude of the crimes. IMO.
I hadn’t taken much notice of the details of the recent Australian legislation on antisemitism until one of your commentators on the video pointed to some very interesting details on it. Had I chosen to share your video on Facebook, I might have found myself on the wrong side of the law. A sad indictment of my chosen haven.
in the 1970 s we began to see documentaries about Britain’s involvement in the slave trade. Since that time I have seen many comments which seek to mitigate the horror of the trade; emphasise the abolition, tell us Africans captured and sold slaves, that others also transported slaves and slavery still exists. They are aspects of the total account but what they don’t do is lessen the fact our ancestors committed a very great wrong. Some people just won’t face up to it.
I think we see something similar today with some, not all, supporters of Israel.
Respect, sir.
The Beatitudes
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matt.5.1-Matt.5.12&version=CEV
provide an important counter to our current “British values” and strangely, seem also to run counter to what I’ve recently been reading about”Judaeo-Christian” values, which seem to be a relatively recent transatlantic construct.
(v11 should not be read as a “pie in the sky” opiate for the masses. For Jesus, those radical and highly subversive heavenly kingdom values/realities were for earth, and for now, as emphasised in the Lord’s Prayer, “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” which is what scared the religious and secular rulers of his time.
Shabana Mahmood would definitely push us in the Australian direction if she could, and will bypass parliament wherever possible, in order to do so.
Agreed and thanks