My Enemy Is Not Iran. My Enemy Is The Western Empire: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

Iran is not my enemy. Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the middle east and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror.

❖

Hezbollah are just Lebanese people. There’s this framing of “liberating Lebanon from Hezbollah” like they’re some kind of invasive, alien presence, when they’re an entirely native fighting force organically arising from the injustices and abuses inflicted by Israel and the west.

The imperial spin machine always does this. The empire uses narrative to try and de-couple the people it wants to kill from the rest of the population in the nation they are targeting in order to legitimize the violence they want to inflict upon the country. They want to take out a certain government or element within a nation that conflicts with their interests, so they start babbling about “terrorists” or “evil dictators” or “regimes” in order to make it seem like they’re not just attacking a country and murdering people who disobey them.

If they can uncouple a nation from the people in that nation who they want to kill in the eyes of the public, then they can portray that killing as a heroic act of liberation from a force which doesn’t belong there. If they can get you to believe that, then they can get you to believe they’re killing people for the benefit of the nation they’re attacking, instead of for their own benefit.

It’s literally always solely and exclusively for their own benefit, though. It’s literally always a lie.

❖

Al Jazeera has an important new feature-length investigative piece out titled “Investigating war crimes in Gaza”, which I highly recommend. Some of the strongest evidence of Israeli sadism and savagery is footage created by Israeli soldiers themselves, many of whom are identified and named by Al Jazeera in this documentary.

Israel will probably be targeting Al Jazeera even more aggressively in retaliation for this.

❖

I saw a line from Lebanese writer Lina Mounzer, “Ask any Arab what the most painful realization of the last year has been and it is this: that we have discovered the extent of our dehumanization to such a degree that it’s impossible to function in the world in the same way.”

This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. The message that Arabs aren’t seen by the west as fully human has been driven home so starkly and undeniably it would be impossible to unsee it. These aren’t just strangers in other countries learning this; they’re our neighbors, coworkers, friends and acquaintances in our community. And they have to interact with white westerners every day while seeing mountains of evidence that their lives aren’t viewed here as having equal weight to western lives or Jewish Israeli lives.

They see us supporting Israel, or acting like nothing’s wrong, or calling Americans who care about Arab lives “single-issue voters”, or shrieking our lungs out over someone waving a Hezbollah flag at a demonstration while paying hardly any attention to Israel’s massacres in Lebanon, or preparing to solemnly commemorate the one-year anniversary of October 7 after a year of ignoring the vastly worse destruction Israel has been inflicting on Gaza.

How crushing would that be? How much would that fuck with your head from moment to moment? How uncomfortable would it be to interact with people in our society after having been smashed in the face with your own dehumanization like this day after day after day for the last year?

It sucks, man. It’s really gross. This is a profoundly sick society.

❖

Anti-Arab racism has led to the murder of well over a hundred thousand people this past year, while antisemitism has led to some hurt feelings. There is a 0.0 percent chance that our society starts rounding up Jews for extermination camps again, but it is a 100 percent reality that Arabs are being butchered by the thousands right now in Gaza and Lebanon because they are not viewed as fully human by the west or its Israeli allies.

Israel supporters rely heavily on framing antisemitism as this massive, imminent threat in our society, but the closest they can come to showing this is to point to either (A) the pro-Palestine movement or (B) the Hamas attack last year. Neither of these things are antisemitism. The Hamas attack was a colonized people desperately trying to fight back against their colonizers, not because they are Jewish but because they are colonizers; it’s not the fault of the Palestinians that their oppressors happen to be Jewish. The pro-Palestine movement consists of opposition to genocide and support for human rights.

Beyond this, all people can point to to suggest that antisemitism is a major threat is the occasional bit of hate speech and the fact that every once in a great while some psycho shoots up a synagogue. These things are a drop in the ocean compared to the mass-scale slaughter we are seeing in the middle east which is being made possible by anti-Arab racism. These things are not equal. They are not even close.

The only way you can make antisemitism feel like a greater concern than anti-Arab racism — or even like an equal or near-equal concern — is to be a racist yourself. You have to see Arab lives as worth so very, very much less than Jewish lives to make the relatively minor concerns of antisemitism seem remotely comparable to daily massacres and atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.

❖

Democrats spent the Trump administration yelling about the threat of Nazis and fascism, and then spent the Biden administration arguing that it’s fine and good to commit genocide in Gaza and arm Nazis in Ukraine.

❖

Israel apologia is unique in that so much of it is just people pretending to believe things they know for a fact are false. They know the IDF is deliberately targeting civilians with airstrikes, snipers and siege warfare, but they pretend to believe it’s just targeting Hamas and Hezbollah. They know Israel is a profoundly racist and abusive country, but they pretend to believe that calling it an apartheid state is antisemitic libel. They knew there were no burnt or beheaded babies, but they pretended to believe there were in order to justify the atrocities they wanted Israel to commit. They knew Jeremy Corbyn was not an antisemite, but they pretended to believe he was in order to keep a pro-Palestinian leftist out of power.

Of course if you say they’re doing this they’ll call you a liar and an antisemite, but they know it’s true, and they know you know it’s true. But they just keep pretending to believe fake nonsense anyway.

Israel supporters display remarkable unity in keeping this lie going, from the most influential pundits and politicians right down to ordinary members of the public. The closest thing I can think of is how parents unite to pretend to believe in Santa, except instead of doing it to keep a magical fantasy alive for their kids, they’re doing it for ethnic cleansing and wars of aggression.

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/my-enemy-is-not-iran-my-enemy-is