why slogans are worse than genocide…

“[Israel] is a colonial enterprise that has decided willingly to desecrate and exploit Jewish symbols in favour of its settler project and we are supposed to distance ourselves from that. If you are using the Star of David as a military symbol, as an icon of conquest, how is that my fault? If you are levelling neighbourhoods to the ground then planting the Star of David in the middle of the neighbourhood; if you are literally carving the Star of David in the faces of young Palestinian men; how are we supposed to distance ourselves from this conflation? When this government is intentionally explicitly and institutionally conflating Judaism, the religion, with Zionism, a racist ideology, the burden and the responsibility of making the distinction does not fall on the oppressed. It does not fall on the colonised when they are exploiting that conflation in their favour. This falls on them.”

— Mohammed Al-Kurd [from 8:35 mins]

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In the world today, there is just one overtly racist regime left standing and that is the one existing in Israel. Ever since its formation in 1948, when the Zionists came to power, it has periodically ethnically cleansed the land of its indigenous Palestinian population while it also maintains a strict and ever-tightening apartheid system. In consequence, Israel is an anachronism, because racism of this full-blown kind has otherwise been totally eradicated across the world.

Historically being racist has always equated to the false belief that your own ‘race’ or people should dominate others. Thus, as a racist you acted to ensure this happened by means of both the segregation and subjugation of those others. This is why in the past (as now) true racism always results in apartheid, expulsion and/or murder. It is why all true racism is so horrific.

Moreover, racism has traditionally followed from a parallel false belief that your own ‘race’ is inherently superior to others. And seventy-plus years ago, a great many people (especially European people) held on very tightly to this belief, buttressing their opinions with the popular science of the day. However, with the discovery of DNA and advent of real genetics, such pseudoscientific foundations were slowly dismantled altogether.

There is no race science today. In consequence, bigotry relies on cultural distinctions between peoples, which alone maintain falsehoods of racial superiority. Hence, today’s racist pretence is not that the others are genetically inferior, but that their upbringing, their lifestyle, and most importantly their religio-political beliefs, are second-rate at best, and at worst reprehensible. “Islamophobia” is a deeply problematic label, but it is also an illuminating one.

Stepping back from this, we should now recognise that the very definition of racism has been shifted in response to these changes of outlook. Indeed, the very concept of ‘racism’ has been steadily redefined and purposefully weaponised to ensure in its new formulation, the label better attaches to words and opinions than to actions and deeds.

Today, anyone who fails to stick within the bounds of acceptable thought and language on issues of ‘identity’, and in this specific case of ethnicity, is most likely to be deemed then castigated and marginalised as ‘a racist’. Meanwhile, the Western establishment effectively maintains a global hegemony – an empire – by means of subjugating the majority of the world’s population just as it did historically; by using all the well-honed tools of the old-school racists, but as it does so, there is nowadays a softer language that neoimperialism fosters.

The “war on terror” has been the single standout example of the new racism, because you can only legitimately “shock and awe” a lesser people. This campaign of slaughter of people of darker skin colour was done on the pretext that they represented an immediate danger or (without irony) these same people need saving and so we later came to their rescue in “humanitarian interventions”. In short, the entire western establishment is racist to its core. Or to paraphrase Josep Borrell, we are the garden, they are the jungle:

Yet, Israel still stands apart in this regard, since, to reiterate, it is the last remaining island of European settler colonial racism. So racism, the very word itself, has had to been reinvented to defend Israel in particular. And our new definition of “anti-Semitism” then enables the West to put aside the origins of this obscene ideology, and reattach it. To forget the rapacious imperialism of the western powers, and to look past the real-time murder of women and children whose only crime was to be born with the wrong ethnicity. To fixate instead upon a misplaced word or any word that calls back our attention to the real horrors of actual racism that still remain an everyday Twenty-first Century reality most especially in Palestine today.

Why are slogans worse than genocide? To permit genocide, of course.

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Additional:

When I posted this article I noticed that the original version of Josep Borrell’s notorious speech has restricted viewing. Incredible isn’t it? Anyway, here’s a different version uploaded by MME that you are still permitted to view without clicking away to the Youtube link: