'The Labour administration […] intends to flatten social, political – and therefore class – conflict, and reassert the state as the sole “legitimate” agent of politics in Britain.'

'One could reasonably suggest that the particular vitriol reserved for Muslims by the Labour leadership comes down to an as yet not-entirely-tameable internationalist consciousness among Muslim communities in Britain, and their proven willingness to exert this electorally.'

Azfar Shafi writes: https://vashtimedia.com/starmers-project-depoliticisation/ @supremacy

[…]

"Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice."

Omer Bartov: https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov

"Unlike the majority of @israel -is these young people had seen the destruction of #Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy."
…

Omer Bartov wrote about the need of Jewish Israelis to believe in their national morality and to nourish #victimhood:

"This is the logic of endless violence, a logic that allows one to destroy entire populations and to feel totally justified in doing so. It is a logic of victimhood – we must kill them before they kill us, as they did before – and nothing empowers violence more than a righteous sense of victimhood."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov

"It is to the political benefit of the existing system to keep whites, especially poor whites with little more than their whiteness to be proud of. It makes for a predictable political group. Whites thus managed will vote and flock to issues as reliably as tides."

Quinn Norton: https://medium.com/message/how-white-people-got-made-6eeb076ade42 @supremacy

A small minority of well-born men exercised despotic power over their fellow citizens in the name of an aristocratic conception of society, on two occasions around 400 BC.

After military defeat, "the Athenian Ekklesia (Assembly) soon divided into three camps: those who favored a "patrios politeia" (ancestral constitution), those who desired to keep a democracy, and those who wanted an oligarchy." Opposition to any resolution was mainly led by the democratic faction. Debate and inaction continued until September 404 BC, when the Spartans chose to intervene. They asked the Athenians to choose thirty men to manage all polis affairs.
"The Thirty at first avoided crafting a definite constitution. They sought instead to a) establish an interim functioning government; b) eliminate opponents; and c) reform the laws".
Details: https://www.worldhistory.org/The_Thirty_Tyrants/

"Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and this is the way it was inevitably seen by Gandhi, who pleaded with Zionist leaders not to resort to terrorism against Arabs using Western arms".

Pankaj Mishra in #LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n06/pankaj-mishra/the-shoah-after-gaza

"A vicious campaign by Israeli academia, police, and media to silence the professor shows Palestinians they have no safe place in Zionist institutions."

by a former student: https://www.972mag.com/nadera-shalhoub-kevorkian-israeli-academia/ @israel @academicchatter