Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm surprised no one's talking about yesterday's attempted plane hijacking in the Middle East. Via the BBC:
Apparently the stabbed pilot managed to open the cockpit door, allowing passengers to storm inside and seize the would-be hijacker (the passengers obviously being alarmed by the plane plummeting 14,000 feet in 30 seconds). One passenger managed to take over the controls and land the plane safely in Saudi Arabia. I've heard unconfirmed reports that Saudi Arabia initially refused to let the plane land within its borders and instructed the pilot to land in Jordan, before finally relenting.
Western media outlets are variously referring to the incident as an "altercation", "fight" or "brawl" between pilots, rather than as a foiled act of jidahi terrorism.
Only luck and heroism prevented the deaths of 174 people.
Luck with where the stab wound appeared to be. Luck that there was a pilot among the passengers who could land the plane. Heroism from the stabbed co-pilot and some passengers.
Some people are trying to call this act of terrorism fake news or a false flag operation.
The amount of antisemitism and Muslim sympathies that are allowed to flourish these days, makes me a bit worried.
We're way past the realm of "that isn't happening, and it's good that it is". I'm proposing something instead called "The anti-Zionist's prayer (modelled on Dayna Craig's "narcissist's prayer"):
That didn’t happen.
And if it did, it was a false flag attack/the Hannibal doctrine.
And if it wasn't, the IDF knew about it in advance and let it happen.
And if they didn't, it wasn't a big deal.
And if it was, you Jews deserved it.
Is this not just the general pattern of how everyone handles instances of violence (or, more generally, violations of something they claim to be a principle they hold when they actually don't) against an enemy? Pro-Israelis do the same thing about "Israeli military sniping women and children for sport" reports; pro-Ukrainians pulled it about North Stream, Ukrainian assassinations of their own opposition abroad, and whenever their own attacks hit civilians; pro-Russians could be seen pulling it in real time about the invasion of Ukraine itself, among others; and so on and so forth.
We are all by and large beasts wishing for peace and prosperity for our friends and misery and death for our enemies, and the pretense that there is any ethics or principles beyond that only serves to make us beastlier still, like the trope of the "why you hittin' yourself?" bully.
(On the other hand, of you are willing to forego treating your arguments, empathy and every other act of communication as soldiers, there isn't even any particular contradiction between being happy for the passengers and thinking Israel is in the wrong! You can cheer on both the Russian and the Ukrainian soldier cleverly dodging a drone, even though each act is sure to set back the cause of the respective other by a little and threading the needle to support both causes at once is hard. These are fellow humans; they fought to survive against stacked odds; by luck, quick thinking, skill and coordination, they managed to pull it off.)
I don't claim that this pattern is unique to anti-Zionists, but I find it a bit strange the way otherwise sensible and down-to-earth people (people who might have even scoffed at previous generations of conspiracy theories, turning "9/11 was an inside job" and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams" into punchlines) reflexively reach for the "it was a Mossad false flag" explanation the second they hear about anything bad targeting Jews.
@Tanista below me writes:
Acknowledging that the bad thing happened but insisting that the victim had it coming is, indeed, a perfectly ordinary human response. But in my experience, Western anti-Zionists/pro-Palestinians seem to be afflicted with a far stranger kind of conspiratorial cognitive dissonance. When a bad thing happens to Jews, they demand far more evidence that it really happened than they would ever demand had it befallen a different ethnic group. (Indeed, lots of people who are credulous about hate crimes targeting black people or Muslims are maximally sceptical about crimes targeting Jews.) When you can finally get them to begrudgingly concede that it really happened, they'll insist that it was a false flag, or that the IDF knew about it and allowed it to happen as a casus belli. When you can finally get them to concede that this is absurd (why would a nation capable of and intent on committing genocide wait until they were attacked to start doing so? Does that pattern-match to any historical genocide?), only then will they say that the bad thing happened, the Jews didn't "allow it" to happen to them – but they had it coming because of Gaza.
I don't quite know why this is the case, but it's a pattern I've observed across dozens of people who call themselves pro-Palestinian or anti-Zionist. To reiterate: I'm not claiming this pattern is unique to them.
I don't see as strong an effect as you seem to do - if you open German newspaper comment sections now, there are still people trying to inject conspiracy theories about how the Nord Stream bombing was really a Russian false flag, and they are not falling behind your median Mossad tale in complexity. Whatever difference there still is, in terms of the complexity hostile conspiracy theories impute to Israeli plots, can surely be explained by the Israelis and their cheerleaders themselves cultivating an image of superhuman competence and non-pickiness of means. Surely the idea that they recruited Hitler's former right hand man to assassinate Germans working for their adversaries would have been in the class of conspiracy theories you would call out the ridiculousness of, had they not publicised it themselves.
Because they require continued Western backing, if not for the genocide itself then at least to sustain their long-term economy and strategy. I can't think of any historical precedent for the general configuration that necessitates this strategy, where an overwhelming global hegemon's actions are constrained by a somewhat well-informed population's perceptions of morality - the window perhaps opened with Vietnam, and is now closing as tribalism and consensus-manufacturing tech are catching up. Any candidate examples would therefore have to be putative genocides, by nations the US could be expected to intervene for or against, in the last 50 years. That's not a big pool, and what there is is largely still hot culture war material that it's impossible to analyse dispassionately.
That's really swinging it far. Skorzeny was a warrior who happened to be German (well technically Austrian but you know...), so he ended up fighting on the wrong side, but he wasn't anywhere in the top Nazi hierarchy and as far as I could see, played zero role in setting any plans or policies or ideology. So "right hand man" is not a very proper description. He AFAIK also wasn't implicated in any atrocities or "final solution" type programs, so the decision to employ him is no stranger than the decision to use, e.g., Von Braun. There are moral questions with both, for sure, but neither are "Hitler's former right hand men".
I concede this wording was a bit hyperbolic/imprecise, but given his pivotal role in the Horthy abduction and Mussolini's rescue it's hard to imagine that someone would have been considered a higher-pedigree spy in the Hitler administration, at least.
He was certainly a very valued technical specialist (just as Von Braun or Heisenberg or Porsche were), but that was all he was, he didn't have any "hand" in higher (or, deeper) circles. I am not saying this to somehow praise or excuse him, but rather to emphasize it's quite a common phenomenon - there were a number of highly capable specialists working for that horrible regime, and when that regime had been destroyed, they continued to be valued.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It doesn't seem that complicated. Any sort of reasonable standard for war crimes or violation of international law damns Hamas (and Hezbollah) as much as Israel and functions as a casus belli for Israeli actions against Hamas that would cost a ton of lives. You go this way and then you're just Biden and everyone else complicit in the "genocide".
Any rejection of moral standards turns this into an amoral contest of strength, which Palestinians cannot win. If they both suck, why not go with the richer, more competent, more militarily capable force and close your eyes and let nature take its course?
So the only response when faced with things done by the other side is to deflect, deny, minimize and hope that enough people have internalized the progressive stack enough to find those denials convincing.
It makes sense for the Palestinians to do this - though kind of sad that they've had to Christianize their jihadism - but why Westerners care is the strange thing.
tl;dr: They're pussies. Pussies cannot win fights, so pussies construct a moral system in which responding to their indirect or feeble aggression with the direct version is unacceptable (this has already been trialed in local contexts with the whole prescription against "punching down")
Because the news says it. Because that’s the oil region of the world. Because it’s The Holy Land. Because The Jews. Because we want sensemakers to explain how bad people aren’t bad, actually. Pick a reason, there are dozens more.
Here’s one I just thought of. A world full of govts has taken the place of God in our lives, and the Middle East is its theodicy: if Civilization is all-powerful, why does evil still exist in the Middle East?
Either Civilization is not all-powerful (which bodes poorly for socialists) or is not all-good (even more poorly), or Israel/Islam is the dualist enemy of Civilization, as powerful as all good governments put together, insidiously worming its way into each and corrupting it (which is too prevalent a conclusion).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Without getting into whether all these deflections are equally credible, I suppose one odd thing is that liberal, secular Westerners are deploying tribal rationalizations for various Middle Eastern groups whose values are very different from theirs (or they outright swear hostility).
The Israelis and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who shrugs at reports of crimes from their own are at least behaving in a normal, if not morally upstanding, way.
I was not particularly thinking of actual Israelis, Ukrainians or Russians when making that list. All of those deflections could be sampled from a smattering of Western European and American gentiles, in defense of a team they chose to support. (Was @FtttG himself even Jewish, on that matter?) You could add Chinese/Uyghurs to the list as well, except that topic area has largely dropped from the public consciousness.
I'm not Jewish.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link