By Jeremy Salt
US President Donald Trump. (Photo: video grab)
Trump was filled with grief, anger and shock at the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but not filled with anything at the mass slaughter of children in Gaza.
There was a time, years ago, when the quality press would enlighten readers with thoughtful analyses of what law and morality mean, as applied to contemporary political situations.
They have not entirely disappeared, but there are now far fewer of them in the mainstream, as if they have been deliberately displaced to prevent people from building on informed opinion to think for themselves. Bear in mind that the propaganda within the ‘free press’ is far more effective than state propaganda. ‘Free for whom?’ the reader or viewer will ask, with good reason.
What increasingly sees the light of day is propaganda reflecting the biases of the ‘news’ outlet’s political line, embedded in piles of asinine chatter. This is the media straitjacket into which we all have been strapped.
Another aspect of the contemporary world situation is what seems to be widespread cognitive dissonance, that is, the gulf between reality and what people choose to believe.
This is only credible if we are persuaded that the politicians and the media commentators do not really know what is going on. Because they must know, it is not credible at all, especially when they shut their eyes to genocide.
Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were murdered during the war on their country, led by the US and the UK. Yes, murdered. Let’s not use the bland ‘died’ or ‘were killed’ because this was state-organized mass murder of a defenseless people.
Iraq was ga enocide, parceled out twice, 1991-2003 and, then, the attack of 2004.
Of course, there is nothing unusual about genocides in human history, and now we have another one, the Gaza genocide, a subset of the ongoing greater Palestinian genocide, something that is deliberately obscured with the ceaseless references to the false starting point of October 7 in the ‘western’ media.
Each genocide has distinctive characteristics beyond the common characteristic of mass slaughter. Gaza stands out because the genocide has been live-streamed. This is a first for which Israel will always be remembered, but Gaza also stands out because the state boasts about what it is doing, because the people celebrate it and because of the attention paid to the detail of destruction.
This ranges from the precision bombing of residential towers, to the precision shooting of young boys in the testicles, to the precision peppering of a car with thousands of bullets to kill the young girl hiding inside under the dead bodies of her family.
Since October 2023, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered or wounded. The mass loss of limbs torn off the bodies of young children as well as adults is ‘life-changing.’
The media tells us who the terrorists are, not, as we might think: the politicians, military commanders and ordinary soldiers responsible for this slaughter, but their victims. Yes, this is their entire fault. They should have lain down to die a hundred years ago instead of fighting against the theft of their land.
Charlie Kirk was on Israel’s side, despite the misgivings he was beginning to have, as even hard-boiled supporters of Israel were starting to ask questions. Just in the week before Kirk was murdered, Israel murdered 500 Palestinians in Gaza. Amidst the hundreds of thousands already killed or wounded, 500 more merited only a down-page mention in a ‘western’ media saturated with the murder of one person.
Paying tribute to Kirk, Barack Obama said, “This kind of despicable violence has no place in our society.” The phrase was repeated by Joe Biden (“there is no place in our society for this kind of violence”) and Kamala Harris (“political violence has no place in America”).
These responses would have been better expressed as political violence should have no place in “our society” because, without violence, there would have been no United States of America.
The violence begins with the white settler wars on the native tribes and moves on to the violence against the black population to ensure white supremacy and Christian values, the violence of the settlers against each other (the civil war) and the violence against presidents (four assassinated, along with other assassinations).
Then there is juridical violence (against Saccho and Vanzetti and many others), police/FBI violence against designated enemies of the state and corporate violence against workers. In one way or another, the violence was always political.
Responding to the Kirk murder, Trump referred to the “tragic consequences of demonizing those with whom you disagree” and the “kind of rhetoric comparing wonderful Americans to Nazis, mass murderers and criminals” that is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
This “kind of rhetoric” is the same kind of rhetoric that Trump has indulged in, with his abuse of “crooked Hillary,” “crooked Joe Biden,” “crazy Bernie” (Sanders) and that “disgusting degenerate” Nancy Pelosi. The point here is not the crookedness or otherwise of Clinton and Biden, but the complete lack of propriety.
This is not some loudmouth blowing off steam in the corner bar. This is the president of the United States, but this is what you get when you elect someone with a long history of verbal violence to the highest office in the land.
Trump has his reasons for taking revenge against the Democrats and the media, but he is now going much further. The enemies are everywhere and they all have to be cleaned out. He was already doing this, but the shock caused by the assassination of Kirk allowed him to immediately widen the witch-hunt into a broad-front attack.
Trump is now going after organizations “funding and supporting political violence” as well as “those who go after our judges and our enforcement officials” and “everyone else who brings order to our streets” (including the masked ICE agents who killed someone on the streets just the other day).
These enemies of the people and the state are not radicals or terrorist organizations. Neither are they the leftists demonized by Trump, because there is no left in the mainstream except for the mildest and they are very few in number.
In the Trump world, the enemies within are led by the universities and their young people, the victims. Harvard is already being defunded. Professors are losing their jobs and students their scholarships, or they are being booted out of the country for opposing the genocide in Palestine that Trump and his cohort support.
‘Antisemitism’ is the code for getting rid of them. In this regard, UC Berkeley has just handed the names of 160 suspect professors and students to the Federal Department of Education, and there will be a lot more of this.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk is turning the rising tide of populist fascism into a flood tide elsewhere. In London, posters of Kirk were held aloft in the anti-immigration ‘unite the Kingdom’ white supremacist mass protest. Kirk is now a martyr-icon figure for the extreme right globally.
The dominant figure in the London protest was the anti-Muslim friend of Israel and former paid-up member of the fascist BNP (British National Party), Tommy Robinson. Elon Musk sent an incendiary video message war cry to London and the world, telling the demonstrators to “fight back or you die.”
In the US, the Kirk murder and Kirk’s ‘Christian nationalism’ is turning the public mood back to the rhetoric of the populist radio priest of the 1930s, Father Coghlan.
Berated in his weekly broadcasts to millions, his enemies of the people were communists, socialists, capitalists, Marxists, bankers, Jews, all combining to bring America down. His Christian Front was another vehicle for his bile. Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism, aimed at communists, Marxists, the UN and ‘one-worldism,’ followed in the 1950s.
Apart from the fact that making violence and making apple pies are as American as each other, there is the long history of American violence unloaded on other countries in the thirst for global domination and other people’s resources.
“Violence has no place in our society,” Obama, Biden, and Harris say, when it clearly does, but shouldn’t American violence in other societies, infinitely more destructive than anything at home, have no place in American society?
Democrats are just as violent as their gun-toting Republican rivals. It was, after all, a Democrat who ordered the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Democrats who took the US into wars in Korea and Southeast Asia that killed millions of civilians.
In his time, Barack Obama signed an executive order every Tuesday for targeted ‘executions’ in impoverished far-off countries (mostly Yemen), which killed countless numbers of women and children, as well as their intended target.
Obama then upgraded murder to the destruction of an entire country, Libya, on the basis of lies told at the UN to justify the imposition of a no-fly zone. Thousands were killed, Muammar Al-Gaddafi was murdered, and the most developed country in Africa was destroyed by the time Obama and NATO had let go of their victim. This was truly “despicable violence” committed by the man now condemning despicable violence.
On her social media platform, Megyn Kelly sobbed on hearing that Charlie Kirk had been murdered. This was understandable. They shared the same right-wing ideological bias, and Kirk was a personal friend, but compare her tears to her reaction to the death and starvation of children in Gaza.
This, she once put down to “the Palestinians and their amazing propaganda abilities … they put all this on camera to make sure we see it.” In her view, these ‘claims’ were not real but part of the Palestinian “lifetime commitment to propaganda.”
Kelly cannot be forgiven for not knowing any better. She is smart, articulate, has a law degree, and is perfectly able to find out the truth in Gaza instead of covering it up with these stupid statements.
Compared to the flood of tears for Charlie Kirk, Megyn Kelly has shed none for the victims of Israeli mass murder in Gaza. Only recently has she slightly backed away from her support for Israel, not because it is committing genocide but because it has made itself the villain of the world “by letting this thing go on so long.” So basically, the problem is one of public relations.
Then there’s Trump, the murderer of Qasim Suleimani, urging Israel repeatedly to “finish the job” in Gaza by destroying it and driving out its people.
Trump was filled with grief, anger and shock at the assassination of Charlie Kirk, but not filled with anything at the mass slaughter of children in Gaza. Why would he be, when he is responsible for it?
Even George Bush joined in, mourning “this young man murdered in cold blood,” while remaining indifferent to the hundreds of thousands murdered in Iraq during his presidency, and that of his father.
This is not cognitive dissonance. All of the powerbrokers know exactly what is going on in Gaza. They cannot not know. Obama knows. Megyn Kelly knows, they all know. Israel may be repugnant to them but they are not going to say so.
They have more important things on their mind than genocide. Their ratings, their sponsors, their advertisers, their personal wealth, their political connections and the power of the Israeli lobby. They are not going to put themselves at risk. Not even the mass murder of children moves them to action.
Endless tears for Charlie Kirk, but not one tear for the tens of thousands of lives cut short by Israeli missiles, tank shells and sniper fire in Gaza. All murdered by Israel with the weapons and political cover provided by the US.
Even after centuries of imperialist destruction some things don’t change. Black lives matter at home (or should matter), but masses of black and brown lives far from home do not. Even one white life counts for more. The tens of thousands of dead Palestinians are just more roadside kill on the highway of ‘western civilization’ and the barbaric outpost it implanted at the heart of the Middle East.
– Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press) and The Last Ottoman Wars. The Human Cost 1877-1923 (University of Utah Press, 2019). He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle.
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