Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
o, you’re not hallucinating: western governments really are condemning Israel, one-by-one, without equivocation. Not because of the ongoing genocide in Gaza that has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, of course, but because of a PR stunt in which Israel’s national security minister filmed himself taunting foreign activists.
On Wednesday morning, Itamar Ben-Gvir arrived at the port where Israel had detained hundreds of participants in an international aid flotilla that was attempting to breach the naval blockade of Gaza. In a video he posted to social media, the minister can be seen mocking the activists as they are forced to kneel in rows with their heads on the ground and hands bound with zip ties. Israel’s national anthem can be heard blasting over loudspeakers, before we see Ben-Gvir waving an Israeli flag and shouting: “Welcome to Israel. We are the landlords here.”
... full articleBeing a Jew, one learns to believe in the reality of cruelty and one learns to recognize indifference to human suffering as a fact.
Israel’s far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, has triggered global outrage after sharing footage of himself taunting bound activists who had been detained as they tried to sail to Gaza with aid.
The video has been widely condemned by world leaders, including the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, and by Israeli politicians, among them the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
... full articleIf the laws are to be so trampled upon with impunity, and a minority is to dictate to the majority, there is an end put at one stroke to republican government, and nothing but anarchy and confusion is to be expected thereafter.
The latest trend among white livestreamers for generating “content”? Approaching Black strangers minding their own business, repeatedly calling them “niggers,” labeling however they respond as “chimping out” and—of course—collecting a pile of money from fans who literally pay to be entertained by racial humiliation.
The biggest star of these “ragebaiting” videos, as they’re called for obvious reasons, is 28-year-old Tennessean Dalton Eatherly, better known online as “Chud the Builder.” Eatherly’s sizable fanbase is built on livestreams in which he sidles up to random Black people, provokes them with racist abuse and dares them to react while threatening to shoot them with the gun and bear mace he carries. This little routine realized its Chekhovian inevitability this past Wednesday, May 13, when Chud shot a Black man—reportedly a disabled veteran—outside the courthouse where he was appearing in one of two criminal cases for which he was already out on bond. (Those cases include an early May incident when Chud refused to pay a $371 restaurant bill; the livestreamed footage of the incident, which you can still watch here, features him berating restaurant employees, including a South Asian server he calls a “jeet” and instructs to go “shit in the street.”) On Friday, the judge overseeing the shooting case announced charges of attempted murder, employing a firearm during the commission of a dangerous felony, aggravated assault, reckless endangerment with a deadly weapon, as well as a $1.25 million bond. Along with a Black stranger, according to reports, Chud also shot himself in the arm. As writer Dixon D. White notes, there may be no more perfect metaphor for the self-inflicted wound of white supremacy.
... full articleThe ultimate enemy of Democracy is not the drug dealer of the crooked politician or the crazed skinhead. The ultimate enemy is the New King that has become so powerful it can murder its own citizens with impunity.
