A late afternoon delight for specialist herpetologists featuring the Lynch mob and a Churchillian Henry ...

 

Luckily the pond managed to flee the reptiles' 'nuke the country' war zone for a few moments to sample a couple of late afternoon delights ...

It would have been remiss not to feature the musings of the Lynch mob, and positively derelict to avoid the hole in the bucket man in Churchill mode ...

Better late than never even if it means only hard core herpetology students will be rewarded ...

The pond is sorry, but as soon as the pond sees "woke" in a reptile headline, it has to revert to tradition.

There's no doubt it's incredibly witty and funny, being mangled into "wokester-in-chief", but all the same the pond must invoke a ritual as old as Stonehenge ...

The reptiles naturally seized on the Lynch mob's mansplaining by dragging in a reference to the conspirator in chief, and so offered up a huge snap ... they even labelled it so the aged demographic in search of angertainment knew who to hate ...

The pond felt compelled to match that snap with a cartoon ...

Sheesh, so that's what the private plane is for.

Already in deep into conspiracies, and the pond had barely scratched the surface of the great Kamela Konspiracy ... but the Lynch mob was now ready for a hanging ...

Half of YouTube? A masterly exaggeration of the kind you expect from academics in full feathered fact-checking flight ... but as we're talking of removals, why not another cartoon?

The pond can understand the riff that the Lynch mob is playing. Who wouldn't be terrified by the sight of a black woman?

At this point in the Lynch mob's scheming, the reptiles ran a snap so comical and so Killer mask-laden that the pond thought it needed to be big ...

Thus far the Lynch mob has carefully avoided too many mentions of the mango Mussolini, but still ....

And then there was just a short gobbet to go ...

It was a classic Trojan horse routine, and we'll see how well the Lynch mob's Kamela Konspiracy strategy works out in the next few months.

Meanwhile, just to wrap it up this half of the entertainment - you've had the B feature and the serial - so how about a cartoon designed to troll him ...

And so to our Henry, not just an extraordinary fixer of holes in buckets, but a man positively brimming with Churchillian visions of genocide and rampant destruction ...

At this point the pond felt the desire to interrupt, as it often does when genocide arrives in the conversation. This was Gideon Levy in Haaretz,  With the 'Perfect' Hostage Rescue Operation, Israel's Dehumanization of Palestinians in Gaza Reached a New Low.

Just like the good old days, Israel once again worships its army. The raid that released Louis Norberto Har and Fernando Marman sparked a crescendo of joy coupled with a resurgence of national pride. The video clips "permitted for publication," took us back to the time when the army was like a Hollywood production, and everyone competed to see who could heap the most praise on the Yaman counter terror unit and on the Shin Bet security service. It was a perfect operation, said all the intelligence experts – with zero casualties.

It was indeed an impressive operation and cause for joy, but it wasn't perfect and it certainly wasn't "zero casualties." The fact that at least 74 Palestinians, including women and children, were killed during the operation was hardly mentioned in Israel. Perhaps those deaths were inevitable. Perhaps even if the number of Palestinian deaths was seven times greater it wouldn't have dampened the celebration. Two very sympathetic Israeli-Argentinians were released and all the rest doesn't matter.

The images I saw from the hospitals in Rafah on the day of the rescue were among the most horrific I have seen in this war. Children ripped to shreds, convulsing, looking helplessly upon their deaths. The horror. There is no need to go into the moral dilemma of whether the release of two hostages justifies the deaths of 74 people – that question is superfluous in such a cruel war – in order to point to Israel's complete disregard for collateral deaths. On the day of the operation, Israel killed 133 people across Gaza, most of them, as is the norm in this war, innocent civilians, among them many children.

We were all happy that they were freed, and the operation in itself was moral and fully justified. But the disregard for the deaths of dozens of people as if they were not human is an outrage. Release more and more hostages, as many as possible. Marvel, rejoice and be proud – but at least mention the terrible price paid by Gazans for this just operation. The children ripped to shreds played no part in seizing the hostages. They have been destined to pay the cruel price for what Hamas did. Alongside our joy, one cannot help but think of them and their fate. An operation cannot be perfect if that is its price.

The disregard for 74 people killed in a just and righteous operation should surprise no one. The dehumanization of Gazans in this war has sunk to a level we have not known before – even after decades of dehumanizing Palestinians under occupation.

The disgraceful lack of coverage of Gaza's suffering by most of the Israeli media will be eternally remembered in disgrace, at least I hope so. As a result, Palestinians are seen by most Israelis as non-human and even non-animal. In Israel, the more than 28,000 Gazan fatalities are considered a mere number, nothing more. The uprooting and displacement of millions of people moved from place to place as if they were a flock of sheep and the unbelievable, brazen portrayal of this as a "humanitarian measure" has dehumanized Gazans even further. If one believes them to be human beings, then surely people cannot be treated like this. You can't abuse people for so long if you believe they are human.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not the most tempestuous politician in his government – even the International Court of Justice in The Hague failed to come up with a single genocidal statement by him (unlike the case with President Herzog). However, he expressed this dehumanization in a particularly picturesque way when he compared Israel's war against Hamas to a glass cup that we had already broken; now, he said, the fragments remain and we are treading on them until nothing remains.

Netanyahu was speaking about Hamas, but after all, everyone knows that Gaza is Hamas. We broke Gaza's glass, now we tread on its fragments until they turn into grains of sand, air, nothing – human dust, sub-human dust.

Of course our Henry won't have any of that wishy washy do gooder talk. 

There's nothing that he likes better than the taste of civilian blood in his mouth, and on his hands ...

He's a total war man ...

For those too lazy to hit the button, a rough translation would be All power concentrated. Total war. Shortest war.

Our Henry likes to think in poster slogans urging total victory ...

Indeed, indeed, if you happen to mistake our Henry for a Dalek, wandering about shouting "exterminate, exterminate", you wouldn't be far wrong ...

Libraries, culture, civilisation? When our Henry hears those words, he reaches for his Glock. 

The pond was reminded of a few lines in Moustafa Bayoumi's piece for the Graudian, Edward Said seems like a prophet: 20 years on, ‘there’s hunger for his narrative’.

...since the latest assault on Gaza began, Israel has destroyed or damaged at least 13 libraries and killed at least six librarians, forcing millions more out of their homes. Abu Toha himself was recently displaced to Cairo, from where he wrote to me: “Edward paved the path for more intellectuals and writers to speak truth to power, which is all the more important now in light of the ongoing dehumanizing and racist Zionist rhetoric towards the Palestinians.”

Such dehumanizing rhetoric is unfortunately not new. It also won’t seem to go away. “Practically the only ethnic group about whom in the west racial slurs are tolerated, even encouraged, is the Arabs,” Said wrote in 1979. The claim sounds possibly hyperbolic until one recalls how the Wall Street Journal recently published an op-ed vilifying the Arab American city of Dearborn, Michigan, as populated with unrepentant terrorists, and Thomas Friedman penned a column in the New York Times, on the same day, comparing Arabs and Iranians to insects. While unfortunately not impossible, it’s certainly difficult to imagine this level of overt bigotry for any other group in major American media outlets. Neither paper has retracted its content.

Bigoted speech is one thing Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians are dealing with today. Curtailment of their speech is another. “Reading Edward Said after October 7 is filled with a certain kind of frustration,” said Timothy Brennan, the author of Places of Mind, a recent biography of Edward Said. “Frustration that he’s not actually here to respond to the very obvious censorship that is afoot in all of the major dailies in the United States. Said could have broken through and found a hearing, at a moment when so many more people around the world are seeing for the first time what the Zionist project really is in practice.” 

You've got to exterminate the insects, kill them all ... and at this point the reptiles slipped in a snap evoking patriotic duty, though featuring a man in his dotage ...

Sure, there might be a few casualties, but you can't exterminate all the insects without breaking a few eggs ... and if you're going to go full Nazi, remember the idols you should follow. Lenin, and von Clausewitz, inspiration for Nazis everywhere ...

Everything for total victory, and extermination, and a shattering and a shocking, and cheap rights-free snaps from days of yore ...

Now there might be a few casualties, but just hand our Henry the button and he'd firebomb Dresden at the drop of a hat, and he'd cheerfully become Shiva, destroyer of worlds ...

What's it like to be one of those dehumanised insects to be cavalierly crushed by Henry in Killer mode?

The Graudian ran a story this day for which a sociopath of the Henry kind would feel absolutely no empathy ...

Bahzad Al-Akhras in The Graudian, with In Rafah, we sit in flimsy tents as the bombs fall. There is no escape: we can only wait for the worst, I work in mental health, but nothing could have prepared me for this feeling of mass hopelessness – frozen in place, seeing no way out:

I’m a doctor and psychiatrist, and before the war in Gaza, my days followed a reliable routine. I would go to work in the clinic, visit my friends and spend time with my family. I lived a normal life. Now, my family and I are refugees in Rafah, after the Israeli army ordered us to leave our home in Khan Younis. We are living in the worst conditions imaginable. We spend our days waiting. We wait in queues for two or three gallons of drinkable water, or for food or plain flour to make bread over a fire, after months without electricity.

In the last few days, as we heard that Israel was preparing for a ground invasion in Rafah, we knew that there was nowhere else for us to go. Israel claims it will evacuate civilians, but how can we believe that when there seems to be no plan and we have repeatedly seen what they have done before? All we can do – all 1.4 million of us – is wait for the worst. Life feels like one eternal, never-ending day. It is filled with suffering and scenes of horror that you see so often, they begin to blend together. It is our collective new routine to hear, witness, sit with, and walk beside death. Death felt closer than ever when the Israeli military launched extensive airstrikes overnight on 12 February.

I have spent my career working in mental health and community trauma in Gaza, but even that couldn’t prepare me for the profound sense of hopelessness that has spread through our community now, permeating everything. Almost all of the people around me have lost family members, whether they’ve been killed by Israeli airstrikes or snipers, taken by the Israeli army, or displaced to other areas. It is the uncertainty that is killing us slowly. We don’t know who will be next to die or lose their family.

When a human being faces danger or a threat to their survival, they will respond in one of three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. We cannot fight and we cannot escape, so we are a people frozen, many of us for four months now.

When you are in a freeze response, you can’t act or feel normally. People become like zombies. When I am at the clinic in Rafah, waiting in the water queues or talking with neighbours, what I notice is that people’s faces have become empty of life. They are masks of fear, hopelessness and emotional numbness.

Some days, I don’t know how I can carry on mentally. I don’t know how to wake up the next morning and face the fact that this is reality, and relive every day the sounds of the bombardment, the buzz of the drones above our heads. I can’t face yet more news of those we love who have been hurt or killed.

As children, we develop the notion that our sense of security and safety is rooted in our homes. We were told only days ago that our home in Khan Younis was bombed. Our first thoughts were, where will we go? Where will we live? When a person loses their home, that feeling of safety is wrenched away.

When the bombardment of Rafah started, I was with my family in the tent we are living in. What can a thin piece of nylon protect you from? It won’t stop the shrapnel from hitting you or your family. So we stared at the sky and watched the massive bombardment, waiting for our fate, knowing exactly what that meant. What can we do?

We’re a small family. My brother, sister and her four-year-old twin daughters. When I see the terror in my nieces’ eyes, I want to break down.

We are all trying to be strong for the children. But we can’t hide this reality from them – they are experiencing everything just like we are. Everywhere you go, you are surrounded by children without parents or with no living family members.

For us, this is not war. It is a never-ending bloodbath, yet as the world watches the unfolding genocide, no action is being taken that could prevent it. Nothing that is happening to us is justifiable and no human should experience this kind of suffering.

We fear that these warnings by Israel are laying the groundwork for what is to come. They are getting people around the world used to the idea that Rafah is becoming a target – so it won’t come as a shock when we are killed.

Nothing except international intervention will stop this. The international community must keep applying urgent pressure for a permanent ceasefire. It may be our only chance to survive this.

Bahzad Al-Akhras is a Palestinian medical doctor and psychiatrist

Our Henry's got no time for that. He's back in 'Nam, Wagner's playing from the chopper, and he's channeling Lt Colonel Bill Kilgore, or perhaps Gen James F. Hollingworth, because he just loves the smell of napalm in the early Gaza light ...

Is there anywhere safe from chemicals and slaughter reined down from the skies? According to the Graudian, stay clear of hospitals ...

...It is believed most of those who were able to flee the hospital had done so on Wednesday, with local health officials reporting that about 2,000 people arrived in the southern border town of Rafah overnight, while others went north, to Deir al-Balah.

The charity Médecins Sans Frontières said people faced an impossible choice to stay “and become a potential target” or leave “into an apocalyptic landscape” of bombings. A member of its staff had been detained at an Israeli checkpoint after leaving Nasser, the organisation said on Thursday.

Mohammad al-Moghrabi, who had been sheltering in the compound, said some people who attempted to leave on Wednesday were shot at and so returned to the hospital.

“This morning they said there was a safe passage, so we left, but it wasn’t safe. They approached us with a bulldozer and a tank, they insulted us and left us for four hours under the sun,” he told Reuters.

Dozens of Israeli attacks on struggling hospitals in the Gaza Strip during the latest war in the besieged coastal territory, now in its fifth month, have been condemned as a breach of international humanitarian law. Almost all medical centres in Gaza quickly became places of refuge for thousands of people fleeing the Israeli military’s massive bombardment campaign, as it was thought hospitals would be safe.

It's all grist to the mill for Henry's insect extermination campaign ...

Is there any hope for this worshipper of a Prussian strategist beloved by Adolf?

So it goes, from gulag to gulag, from ghetto to ghetto, from Lord Haw-Haw to Lord Henry-Henry, though some try to suggest alternatives, as in this piece in The New Yorker by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, Jewish Identity with and without Zionism (paywall):

...Magid, a professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth and an ordained rabbi with a pulpit on Fire Island, was raised in a New York suburb by secular Socialist parents with ties to the Workmen’s Circle, then a mutual-aid society devoted to the cultivation of Yiddish cultural autonomy. In 1978, as a hippie in his early twenties, he moved to Israel in an aimless search for spiritual communion. He had, by his own admission, no interest in Zionism or even Judaism, but he sought by instinct a sense of cosmic affinity in the sunlit uplands of the ancients. Over the years, he took up with like-minded counterculturalists in a Jerusalem yeshiva, fell in and out of various Haredi communities, and spent time among the early settlers. As he wandered in the desert, he was exposed to crosscurrents of Messianism. On the one hand, he was introduced to the dwindling strongholds of religious anti-Zionism, whose proponents maintained a “spiritual posture” against the establishment of a secular Jewish nation, which violated two thousand years of rabbinical teaching about exile; he eventually came to read Joel Teitelbaum, the Satmar rebbe and a lifelong opponent of the Jewish state, a homecoming that was supposed to occur only with the arrival of the Messiah. On the other hand, Magid was attracted to the then marginal rise of Religious Zionism, which married Romantic ideals about nation and land to a divine quest for the deliverance of the Jewish people. The Religious Zionists, who looked upon the settlement of their God-given enclave as a necessary precursor to the fulfillment of the covenant, “truly believed they were the vanguard, riding the wave of messianic time.” He writes, “To me, it appeared to be a Jewish spiritual path that had left Europe behind. Its center was not the nostalgia of the shtetl but the mysterious resonance of a more ancient landscape. I later came to see that while the former was quaint and outdated, the latter was powerful yet dangerous.”

He catches an early glimpse of disturbance on the horizon at a Shabbat service in Atzmona, a settlement in Gaza. He writes, “Gazing out at the village of Khan Yunis, seeing Palestinians riding their donkeys and carts home from the market, and hearing the call to prayer from the many mosques that dotted the landscape, I realized that the people in Atzmona did not really see the Palestinians as coinhabitants; they were not part of their project. The settlers viewed their neighbors as part of the background, like the flora and fauna.” Something, he says, “broke inside me in that beautiful spot by the sea.” At the time, as Religious Zionism was beginning to coalesce as a political movement, Magid observes that Palestinians were still not exactly seen as enemies; they were more like natural features of an Oriental panorama, obstructions to the Zionist project to be rearranged or removed by God’s will. By the time Magid served in the I.D.F., though, during the first intifada, the hostility had become explicit. The tensions between his apolitical spiritual yearning and the reality of the political project on the ground became too much for him to bear. Some of his fellow-travellers on the hippie path began to adopt the increasingly common position of “right on Israel, left on everything else,” but he found himself ultimately unable to reconcile “the counterculture’s commitment to the freedom, justice, civil rights, nonviolence, and equality in the context of Israel’s continued occupation that includes systematic discrimination against the Palestinian population.”

The book is a record of his painful surrendering of Zionism, an ideological project that he compares to Manifest Destiny. He advocates instead for what he gingerly calls “counter-Zionism,” a “new collective ideology that, if enacted, could serve Israel as a more liberal and democratic place for the next phase of its existence.” Zionism in its statist form was, in other words, an historically spent force, a nineteenth-century solution to the problem of antisemitism; it is past time, he thinks, to seek a new solution that allows for the self-determination of both Israelis and Palestinians. The state’s character, he writes, “would not be structured on the notion that this land ‘belongs’ to anyone, it would be a true democracy.”

And so on, and don't expect our Henry to listen, to care or to change. He's signed up for the fight with von Clausewitz ... and only total victory will satisfy the blood lust ...

Of course instead of total victory, you might be radicalising all sorts of people, you might be generating the sort of hatred that could run four hundred years or so, as little in recession England managed with the Irish, or you might see neo-Nazis on the rise in Germany and supported by the GOP as a way to take the White House.

Or you might do a Carthage. That seems to be the plan at the moment, but karma's a bitch. Just ask the Romans you sometimes quote.

Whatever, a fine genocidal future awaits, nurtured by academics with hate in their hearts.

Phew, that talk of genocide always unnerves the pond so what a relief to see, in relation to another genocide, that the wannabe Lord Haw-Haw got the right royal treatment ...

Oh and the memes keep coming. The pond likes this one so much it might give it another canter instead of wasting it on a late Friday arvo post ...