Keir Starmer, genocide denier

Although Keir Starmer going out to bat for the genocidal Netanyahu regime (and giving it feminine pronouns) is very much the established norm, on some level I'm puzzled by his decision today to double down on David Lammy's insistence that Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. Ultimately this will not remain a matter of interpretation for self-interested politicians - the question of whether genocide has occurred will be adjudicated in international courts and also by academics.  When a legal and academic consensus of genocide is established, and I do think that's now a question of 'when' rather than 'if', Starmer will clearly be seen to have been catastrophically on the wrong side of history, and that's bound to be detrimental to his legacy.  It really is odd that he's not leaving himself a bit of wiggle-room.

In one specific sense, of course, Lammy was just indisputably wrong and there should have been no great difficulty in publicly admitting that. He suggested that not enough Palestinians had been killed for it to be genocide, and using that word would trivialise 'real' genocides like the Holocaust in which millions died.  However, the first legally recognised genocide in Europe after the Holocaust was the Srebrenica massacre of July 1995, in which "only" 8000 people died. That's less than a fifth of the minimum death toll in Gaza (likely to be a massive underestimate) and is a little over 0.1% of the number killed in the Holocaust.  Ultimately defining genocide isn't a numbers game, it's about the nature and characteristics of the act.

In the long run, the UK government's good relations with Netanyahu could end up looking as poorly judged as having good relations with Hitler - the only real difference between the two leaders' actions is one of scale.  It's interesting that one of the reasons given for scepticism over the claims that Donald Trump is a fascist is that true fascist governments of the past have tended to be violently expansionist.  Well, Trump may not tick that box (notwithstanding his fury when Denmark refused to sell him Greenland) but Netanyahu certainly does - he's made no secret of the fact that he's going all-out for annexation of what both he and Bill Clinton call "Judea and Samaria", ie. the sovereign Palestinian territory of the West Bank.  The Israeli government also meets a number of the other criteria for fascism, notably militarism, suppression of opposition and a belief in racial supremacy.

An authentic fascist leader is committing an authentic genocide in plain sight in the year 2024 - and yet he remains the West's number one buddy.  That's going to have long-term consequences for leaders like Starmer, probably well beyond what most people can imagine right now.

Do Brit Nats *really* think they can sell Prime Minister Badenoch as acceptable to Scotland? They may need to try, as new poll shows a Britain-wide Tory lead

During the Tory leadership contest, I suggested that a Robert Jenrick victory might open up a potential new path by which independence could happen, because he was using withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights as a wedge issue to try to get elected, which would be like a red rag to a bull for many liberal Remainers in Scotland.  Of course Jenrick did not win, and some Tories like George Osborne specifically voted for Kemi Badenoch because they don't want to leave the ECHR, and yet the paradox is that the new path to independence may still be there.  Badenoch has not ruled out leaving the ECHR and has said there may be some circumstances in which it will be necessary, but even beyond that issue she's just extraordinarily right-wing as an overall package.  Many commentators have described her as far-right, and although some might argue that's an exaggeration, I think it's fair to say that at the very least she occupies a grey area between the mainstream hard-right and the far-right.  So if she becomes Prime Minister, or even if a realistic expectation develops that she's going to become Prime Minister in 2028 or 2029, the familiar debate will start again about whether the UK has become too extreme a country for Scotland to feel comfortable within.

Looked at from that point of view, the early signs are ominous for the Brit Nats, because More In Common's first GB-wide poll since Badenoch became leader shows the Tories surging into the lead.

GB-wide voting intentions (More In Common, 8th-11th November 2024):

Conservatives 29% (+3)

Labour 27% (-1)

Reform UK 19% (+1)

Liberal Democrats 11% (-3)

Greens 8% (-)

SNP 2% (-1)

James Cleverly's elimination from the leadership election was supposed to be Christmas come early for Labour because he was purportedly more voter-friendly than Badenoch, but that ignored the fact that the biggest obstacle the Tories have faced in recent times is the split in their natural support base between themselves and Reform UK.  Badenoch would seem to be far better placed than Cleverly to woo Reform voters back, and although there's no real sign that she's succeeded in doing that yet, both the polls conducted since she became leader have shown the Tory vote increasing rather than decreasing (with the caveat that the increase is minor and statistically insignificant in the case of the Techne poll).

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You may well already have seen the video below, but if not I urge you to watch it, because it moves discussion about the genocide in Gaza into a radically new phase.  Apologists for Israel have until now tried to play a philosophical game by arguing that it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians are mass-slaughtered, as long as Israel can nominally claim to have been targeting Hamas in each strike, regardless of how wildly implausible that claim often is, eg. "yeah we bombed the hospital and killed dozens of patients and doctors but that was only because the terrorists buried their GOLD there".  The idea is that it may not technically be genocide if you can muddy the waters about "intent" and "purpose" and make a case that civilians have only been mass-killed "incidentally".  But when you have a credible witness setting out how Israel have on a daily basis used drones to precisely target individual children to murder, you move beyond differing interpretations of possible 'indirect' acts of genocide, and are left with indisputable evidence of a genocide that is every bit as direct, calculated and industrial as the Holocaust, the Srebrenica massacre or the Rwanda genocide.  European politicians have thus far been let off the hook of facing up to that fact thanks to Israel doing its utmost to prevent any independent witnesses to the genocide, so that the pretence can be maintained that this is simply a conflict like previous ones Israel has been involved in, albeit with the customarily insane number of non-Israeli civilian casualties.

To answer the question asked by John Mason and others "if Israel wanted to commit genocide, why haven't they killed ten times as many people?", I'd have thought the answer was pretty obvious - they want to exterminate Palestinians at the maximum scale and speed consistent with retaining the support of the United States.  For any other country that would be an almost impossible balancing act, but not for Israel - and with the incoming Trump administration offering Netanyahu a blank cheque, we may now see the rate of the mass killings increase dramatically to something akin to the murder of Jews in the gas chambers.  The obvious question for us in this country is: what, if anything, will Keir Starmer and David Lammy say and do while this happens?  And if they do nothing other than moronically parrot the words "Israel has the right to defend herself", what will be the long-term consequences for themselves, the Labour party, and the continued viability of the United Kingdom?  

Where is the International Criminal Court?

British surgeon Nizam Mamode broke down in UK Parliament, describing Israel’s quadcopters DELIBERATELY TARGETING CHILDREN who had just been bombed.

pic.twitter.com/oGPYyDFBoz

— sarah (@sahouraxo) November 12, 2024