Bill Clinton blows up his own reputation by embracing the discourse of genocide

Jimmy Carter, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, is widely regarded as the classic example of someone who performed exceptionally well as an ex-president.  No-one could accuse Bill Clinton of aiming for a similar accolade.  Indeed with a single deranged pro-genocide speech, he may have just destroyed his reputation as both a president and ex-president forever.  That might seem like an overstatement, but you have to remember that the only reason there is even any debate over whether what Clinton said was acceptable is that we're currently in a sort of antechamber where it's still possible to maintain the fiction that genocide is not occurring because Israel isn't allowing access to journalists to actually document the atrocities.  But that situation won't last forever - eventually journalists and academic researchers will get into Gaza and reliable estimates of the death toll will emerge.  It'll almost certainly be in the hundreds of thousands, taking into account both those directly murdered by the Israeli military and those who died of starvation and disease due to Israel depriving them of the essentials of life.

Once that happens, the discussion will move on to how on earth the genocide was permitted to occur.  And as with previous genocides such as Rwanda and the Holocaust, there will be a lot of focus on the way in which genocidal language was normalised, for example Israeli officials suggesting that all residents of Gaza are legitimate targets because they are 'human animals' or because they supposedly all support Hamas.  Or an equally good example is Clinton stating that large numbers of innocent people "have" to be mass murdered by Israel because Hamas is hiding behind them.  That evades the obvious point that if one Hamas fighter is hiding behind 400 civilians, you actually have the option not to massacre the 400 civilians because you have the moral sense to know that in doing so you'd be committing a war crime every bit as grave as the one you claim to be avenging.  Always assuming, of course, you actually believe that the Hamas fighter is hiding behind the 400 in the first place, and that you aren't using that as a flimsy excuse because your real and sole aim to is to massacre the 400 as part of a step by step plan to drastically reduce the Arab population of Gaza.

And just as the Nazis prepared the ground for genocide by advancing pseudoscientific gibberish about racial superiority, it'll be considered highly significant that Clinton prayed in aid a mythology of racial entitlement to the land, with the Israelis' actions justified on the ahistorical basis that they were there in the time of King David, long before the Palestinians' own religion was created.  In truth, historians are sceptical as to whether King David actually existed, but even if he did, using the events of thousands of years ago as the basis for a racial hierarchy would undoubtedly give Native Amerìcans free license to do to Bill Clinton and millions of people like him exactly what Israel is currently doing to the Palestinians.

Last but not least, Clinton tried to resurrect his own equivalent of Hitler's "stab in the back" myth by arguing that he has inside knowledge from the Camp David talks at the end of his own presidency that all the ills of the region, including the lack of a Palestinian state, had nothing to do with the Israelis, but were instead the fault of Yasser Arafat, who supposedly torpedoed the most generous offer in the history of the known universe because he was so hellbent on eradicating Israel and having a Palestinian state on 100% of the territory of historic Palestine.  The reality, of course, couldn't be more different.  Arafat conceded before the 2000 talks even began that the 1967 boundaries were the baseline, meaning that Israel would be keeping 78% of historic Palestine, a position far closer to Benjamin Netanyahu's lebensraum fantasy than to the total destruction of Israel. But that, of course, was not enough for the Israelis, who demanded -

* Just over one-tenth of the West Bank, recognised by the international community as indisputably Palestinan territory, would be confiscated by Israel.

* There would be no proper compensation for this land grab.  There would be a nominal "land swap", but the amount of Israeli territory transferred to the Palestinian state would be little over one-tenth the size of the confiscated Palestinian land.

* The land grab would split the Palestinian sovereign territory in the West Bank into three non-contiguous segments.  Adding in the fourth segment of the state in Gaza, this would make Palestine one of the most non-contiguous states in the world, evoking an obvious comparison with "Bantustans".

* The Palestinian state would be demilitarised and Israel would have a veto on any alliances it entered into.  Its airspace would also be controlled by Israel - an absolutely absurd demand that no self-respecting sovereign state would ever agree to.

* Palestinian refugees would have to give up their right to return to their homes in Israel, even though they were violently and illegally displaced by Israeli forces.

* The vast bulk of the conquered Arab-dominated East Jerusalem would be annexed by Israel.  At best, Palestine would be allowed to cobble together some of the newer outlying suburbs, artificially call it "the city of East Jerusalem" and make it the capital.

* Most crucially, Arafat was told that any agreement required him to permanently renounce any further "demands". More than anything else, this made agreement utterly impossible, because the Israeli proposals on issues like Jerusalem and airspace were so inherently unfair and so obviously justified only by blackmail due to Israel's present-day military strength that the only way Arafat could ever agree to them in good conscience was on a provisional basis subject to a review.

Really the only mistake Arafat made in 2000 was to wrongly take Clinton for an honest broker.  Clinton was playing an each-way bet - he was happy enough to pose as peacemaker if he bullied the Palestinians into accepting a deal that would permanently stitch them up.  But just as good for him was for the Palestinians to sensibly walk away, allowing him to self-righteously "stand with Israel" and to spend the next few decades lying through his teeth about what had just happened and who was to blame for it.

Tonight, Matthew, BMG stands for "Bong! Majority's Gone": Labour fall behind in a GB-wide poll for the first time since 2021

The general assumption is that Kemi Badenoch is just minutes away from becoming leader of the Conservative Party, and I expect that assumption to prove correct - although other types of election have proved highly unpredictable in recent years, ballots of Tory members have always played out exactly as billed. If so, Badenoch will surprisingly be inheriting an outright Tory lead, and the question now is whether Tory leads will become the norm over the next four or five years.  In spite of her own obvious shortcomings, that may well be the case.

BMG poll of GB-wide voting intentions (30th-31st October):

Conservatives 29%
Labour 28%
Reform UK 17%
Liberal Democrats 13%
Greens 8%

The fieldwork dates for the poll were the day of the Budget and the day after, although the impression given is that it's a post-Budget poll, ie. the Wednesday fieldwork started after Rachel Reeves had finished her speech.  If so, this is particularly disappointing for Labour, because it suggests that what they thought of as their trump card hasn't staved off crossover.

That said, there's also a Techne poll with similar fieldwork dates showing a slight increase in the Labour lead, albeit well within the margin of error and statistically insignificant.

Between the Trussmageddon of September 2022 and the general election of July 2024, the Tories never even came close to claiming the lead in a single poll.  They seemed to have Everest to climb, and yet it's taken only four months of the public seeing what Starmer is actually like in power for that Everest to be climbed.  In Scotland the hope must be that this will translate into a sustained SNP lead.

Has the Reeves Budget produced anything that would stand in the way of an SNP win in 2026?

Just a quick note to let you know that I have an article at The National about whether Rachel Reeves' first Budget today will help to arrest Labour's tumble in popularity.  You can read it HERE.

The Find Out Now poll showed a Yes majority even though 16 and 17 year olds weren't interviewed

Thanks to Paul Kirkwood on Twitter for pointing out to me that the data tables are now available for the recent Find Out Now poll showing a majority in favour of independence.  It's a single question poll (or if there were other questions they haven't been released yet), so there's not a huge amount to add, but there are a few points of interest.

Firstly, the poll excluded 16 and 17 year olds, not for any sinister reason but simply because the Find Out Now panel is comprised of over-18s only.  When I commissioned a Find Out Now poll eighteen months ago, they actually managed to source the necessary number of 16 and 17 year old respondents from another polling panel, but that may not have been possible this time, or it may have just been decided not to do that because of cost. Whatever the exact reason, it means there's a chance that the Yes vote is being slightly underestimated even at 52%.

The turnout adjustment was decisive in pushing Yes into the lead in this poll.  Before the adjustment, No was ahead by 52% to 48%, and after the adjustment there was an exact reversal, with Yes ahead by 52% to 48%.  That doesn't in any way invalidate the result, because almost all polling firms use a turnout filter, but it does demonstrate the greater enthusiasm levels among Yes voters.

It's specified that the poll result was weighted by gender, age, region, and recalled vote from the 2024 general election.  If that's an exhaustive list, it means there was no weighting by recalled referendum vote in 2014, which would be a very good thing, and other polling firms would be wise to learn from that example, because weighting by a vote from more than a decade ago (with all the dangers of false recall) is getting into the realms of the ridiculous now. However, this methodological difference isn't necessarily the reason for Find Out Now being one of the more Yes-friendly pollsters.  If memory serves me right, they did introduce 2014 weighting at one point but it didn't change their results much.

I always wince when people start treating the regional voting breakdowns as gospel, because the subsample for each region is far too small to produce meaningful results. However, for what it's worth Glasgow has the highest Yes vote in this poll and the Highlands & Islands has the lowest.

A significant minority of independence supporters may have drifted back to Labour at the general election, but that doesn't mean they were giving up on independence.  The poll shows that 25% of people who voted Labour in July would vote for independence, and that rises to 28% if Don't Knows are stripped out.

Depressingly, the old gender gap we'd hoped we'd seen the last of is evident in this poll - there's a bulky Yes majority among men but a slender No majority among women.

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SCOT GOES POP FUNDRAISER 2024: THE FINAL PUSH

To donate by card, please visit the fundraiser page HERE.

Direct Paypal payments can be made to my Paypal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

Many thanks to everyone who has donated so far.

Scot Goes Pop Fundraiser 2024: The Final Push

Click here to go straight to the fundraiser page.

This is 'take two' for the 2024 fundraiser's final push, because as you might remember I attempted a post like this a couple of weeks ago, but literally just an hour after I published it, the tragic news came through that Alex Salmond had died.  However, I can't put off returning to the issue for any longer, because financial realities are what they are, and I think realistically I would need to raise a minimum of an additional £800 within the next two weeks or so to keep the blog afloat on the same basis that it's been operating for many years.  I can't delay the decision beyond that very tight timescale, because I'm in a situation that will be horribly familiar to many of you, ie. the numbers are just not quite adding up, and if I'm going to keep going, I'll need to keep the lights on and I'll need to eat.

To reiterate the points that I always make about fundraising: no, Scot Goes Pop is not my sole income, in spite of the constant "why not get a job" sneering from the trolls.  I'm sure that's self-evident to most sensible people, because the target figure for the annual fundraiser is always well below what is generally needed to live on.  I have multiple other income streams, but for a variety of reasons they aren't bringing in as much as they did prior to the pandemic, and unfortunately that sharp downward turn coincided with the problem of the post-2021 fundraisers repeatedly failing to meet their targets.  It's been a perfect storm, and consequently for the last three years I've been lurching from mini-crisis to mini-crisis.  What the fundraiser money always used to do was give me enough flexibility to just drop everything and blog at length whenever a poll came out or whenever a major story broke, regardless of whether that was at 11am on a weekday or midnight on a Saturday.  In other words, the non-blogging work that I do is mostly freelance and ad hoc, and I fit it around the blogging when required.  

Why are the fundraisers proving such a struggle these days, when they never were prior to 2021?  I'm sure it's partly due to the cost of living crisis, but it must also be partly down to my decision to join the Alba Party in the spring of 2021.  That seemed to displease almost everyone, because SNP supporters didn't like it but strangely many Alba supporters weren't much happier either.  I was a relative moderate within the party - I didn't think we should be waging total war against Nicola Sturgeon or attempting to totally destroy the SNP, and I was very troubled about the chatter over restricting the voting rights of English people living in Scotland.  Some of the harder line Alba members clearly didn't think there should be room for someone like me in the party, and regarded me with severe mistrust.

Hopefully, if there's one silver lining from Chris McEleny's apparent determination to expel me from Alba, it's that nobody can mistake me any longer for a partisan drone.  I literally have no idea what I will do after my likely expulsion.  There are three basic options - a) apply to rejoin the SNP, b) apply to join a smaller pro-indy party, or c) try to assist in setting up something new, and I am genuinely and totally undecided about which of those three would be best.  My mind has almost been like a war zone trying to work it out, and I wish to goodness the Alba powers-that-be would just do the decent thing and drop the malicious proceedings against me so that my dilemma would vanish in a puff of smoke, but I very much doubt that will happen.  So there's little point trying to pin labels on me just now when none really fit.

If I'm unable to raise enough over the next couple of weeks and I have to "stop" blogging, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete cessation, because I would always get a bee in my bonnet about something or other and have a burning desire to blog about it.  However, Scot Goes Pop would revert to being a hobby as it was when I started it way back in 2008, and I would imagine there might be two or three posts a month at the absolute most.

But let's accentuate the positive.  What can readers look forward to if the fundraiser does raise just about enough to keep things going into 2025?  Above all else, of course, there'll be extensive polling analysis from a pro-independence perspective.  We're potentially in quite an exciting phase of the electoral cycle, as the public seem to have decisively concluded that the Labour government is a dud, meaning that instead of the SNP being caught in the death spiral that so many unionist commentators predicted prior to the general election, they're actually showing signs of recovery.  That could set the scene for a much more favourable outcome in the 2026 Holyrood election than we dared to hope for even a few weeks ago.  I'd like Scot Goes Pop to be around to tell that story - because I'm not sure we can rely on the unionist mainstream media to tell it for us.

Secondly, although I'm not impartial about independence, you can rely on me to blog about my own honest views without fear or favour.  I've resisted the menacing demands (which you've probably seen repeatedly in the comments section) for me to turn Scot Goes Pop into an Alba propaganda blog in return for avoiding expulsion, and neither am I interested in being an SNP leadership drone.  I just call things exactly as I see them, and frankly that does set me apart from some (but not all, I hasten to add) of the most prominent pro-indy bloggers.

And no promises, but it would be nice to revive the Scot Goes Popcast - it was going really well for a year or so, with some cracking guests, but again, that was another victim of my decision to join Alba, because SNP and Green people started to blanket-refuse my invitations, not wanting to be associated with an "Alba blogger".  But if I'd been more persistent, I probably could have found some takers, so I might have another crack at it.  

And of course there's the possibility of another Scot Goes Pop poll at some point.  In fact I'll have to get that done eventually even if I do stop blogging, because my last attempt at fundraising specifically for a poll ended up in no-man's-land with some funds raised but not enough to go ahead.  One way or another I'll get it done somehow!

To put in perspective what would be needed to keep Scot Goes Pop going, as I write this the running total on the fundraiser page is £3764.  Another £800 would take it to £4564, so that's a rough guide to where the total would need to be two weeks from now if this final push is to be just about a success.  Obviously more would be better and would give me more of a cushion, but I've got to be realistic and we'll see if another £800 can be managed.

Thank you to everyone who has already donated.  If you haven't donated yet and would like to, there are three main options.

To donate by card, please follow this link to the fundraiser page on GoFundMe.

To donate via PayPal, simply make a direct payment to my PayPal email address, which is:  jkellysta@yahoo.co.uk

To donate via direct bank transfer, please contact me by email and I'll send you the necessary details.  My contact email address is different from my PayPal address and can be found on my Twitter profile or in the sidebar of this blog (desktop version of the site only).

People sometimes ask about fees: GoFundMe now rely on tips to make a profit, but the payment processor they use does still directly deduct a small percentage from donations.  So if you want to avoid fees completely, please select either the PayPal or bank transfer option (and if you choose PayPal, select the non-fee option from the menu).  PayPal also has the advantage of (usually) transferring the funds instantly, whereas with GoFundMe there is a delay of at least several days.