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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.)
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.
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