TRASHFUTURE - Just One More Front ft. Seamus Malekafzali

Episode Date: January 9, 2024

Alice and Riley talk with Seamus Malekafzali about Israel’s ever-expanding war with Palestine, and the ramifications on its neighbours near and far. If you want to read Seamus' work, check out his newsletter here: https://www.seamus-malekafzali.com/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

I anticipated the beat a little bit now. Yeah, that's fine. We're all good. That's fine. I'll just seem slightly smasped up because my punchlines will come in like a half second early. This is Alice called Valkelli as one trick for podcasting. Yeah, I'm like a min-maxing the podcast, you know? Well, well, hello everybody, it's time for TF. It is the first episode we are recording of 2024. Is it a free or a bonus episode this one?

It is a free one. It is the free one. It is the free one. It's the free one. And because Alice is saying that Milo is not here and also Hussein is not here, that's right, it's just Riley and Alice. Real skeleton crew hours. Yes, that's right. And joining us is our,

the man who has become our Middle East correspondent, it is Sheamus Melk of Sally. Sheamus, correspondent, it is Shayma Smellik of Sally. Shayma's how's it going? It's good to be on the trash future for, I think the 17th time. In my lifetime. Yeah, I'm just certainly make it feel that way, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Obviously we welcome you back as now, I think, a sort of platinum onix club member, you're entitled to three free well drinks in the lounge. And yeah, no, always, always a delight to have you on to talk about some of the problems. Yes, as always, I think it's very good to be on a program that keeps updates for Niam when I have entirely checked that for my own sanity. This is a thing, right? We just do this. We just find guests and we devise like the guy from the Saw movies, the perfect sort of torture for them psychologically. And then we just lock them into that forever. Poor Nish Kumar is stuck with like us reading politicians' books and then

we've selected Neum for you. The new name for the newest shape that they're building in Neon is buried behind my left eye. And the only one I'm going to know about is if I I stab my own. I mean, when you think about it, MBS was doing source stuff to Jamal Kashoggi. So it fits, right? Sure. You have always valued it a vision to disrupt the portfolio. In many ways, reading your columns was like having all of your limbs bow and sword off.

Would you turn yourself into a wine? LAUGHTER I have the flu, so I'm delirious. No, I'm right there with you. This is my first of three podcasts today. I look forward to my complete mental disintegration. I think we've only picked three people that we routinely subject to the strangest stuff

in the world that's niche that's shameless and then Maddie for Eric Adams. That's true. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So So look, I've chosen victims. Yeah. Why don't we, because we're already talking about it, let's start with some neon stuff because... Get the vegetables out of the way first.

Yeah, of course, the vegetables of neon. Look, because you might be thinking, hey, you've been talking about neonon, I'm an awful lot recently. And we'll both subscribe to the YouTube channel for sort of massacistic work reasons. And so both of us get an alert on our phones whenever they release a new trailer, which they've been doing every few days now. Yeah. And we would be saving this for later except shameless is on so we got to do it We we have the and

I don't know if you can believe this but they have created another luxury lifestyle destination. Oh really I mean it's crazy you guys are are fucking lying to me Obsequious bullshit, but all right fine went. You can tell me about this. I'm not going to believe it. Yeah. So I was really excited when they released their, their new plans for like topian, which was how they're going to reinvent dinner for neon. It's called topian. Yeah, topian, but the food zone, the eating zone, the meal districts. Oh, yeah. I thought that was pretty boss, but then the problem is,

they went from that, which I was like, okay, great, you've got the zing and the energy of the line back, okay? We got the cube, we have all this exciting stuff. We're no longer just making different shapes of hotel. We're back in business making cool things. But now they've come back out, they're like, hey, we've just released another luxury lifestyle community

that's even more like a normal American gated community than anything else we've come out with so far. I mean, this is sort of a grim development, right? Because the more like a subdivision it is, the more likely it is to actually get built. Yeah. And if Neon turns out to be a bunch of places that could as well be in Scottsdale and like a meter of line, the center of it, that's just sort of the perfect ending.

You also have to remember that as of a couple of months ago, Saudi Arabia has the World Cup. In 2034, they will host the World Cup and they also are hosting the Asian Winter Games. So the line itself, obviously, that's ever getting made in the full capacity that it was envisioned as, Niam, obviously, not the full capacity, but it's envisioned as. But yeah, you can absolutely build hotels. You can absolutely build little gated communities, little resorts, you know, buried up in these mountains. They do that. And if the more space you have to

host people, the more tourists you can have in. I mean, this is what got out of it in 2020. They literally built an entirely new city called Lucille. They built tons of hotels and which also led, and they needed so much space that they were kicking out expats. Landlords are kicking out expats, but raising their rent by thousands of dollars because they needed that much space. So yeah, no, no, no, no, no. This is something that they can build. There's something that they can build soon, and they know that there are enough rich people who will absolutely want to vacation in glorious north western Saudi Arabia.

Yeah. And I mean, aside from that, the rich people on the other end of this are like all of the architecture firms who are competing for Neom stuff who haven't been able to get the like big ticket, like we're going to build you the line, we're going to build you the oxagon, can now compete on we're going to build you the best weirdest subdivision in the world. Oh, it don't get me wrong. Norlana, the newest one is also weird and impossible. It sounds like the name of a woman who has a column in Tatlap.

Okay. I mean, I saw, I saw news of it, but I didn't see any other vague details other than, yeah, that it was a bunch of hotels and it was a bunch of other, so what's impossible about it? Okay, so the basic premise of it is, it's the, this is from its, like, brief. See, the heart of the Norlana community,

so it's a community of single family homes, even less ambitious than like the sort of giant hotel or colleges. Says the heart of the Norlana community will be a spectacular waterfront promenade and open spaces designed to foster human connection. That's the first sentence. Here's the second sentence.

Super yachts can sail into the marina and people will be able to enjoy first rate fine dining and shopping. Okay, great. So it's it's it's like the Simpsons house climbs 500 but backing directly onto like the marina and Monte Carlo. Correct, but the Simpsons here's what makes it impossible, which is that the Simpsons house, imagine the Simpsons house, right? Sure, but- Rotate in my mind. But can't to leave her out over the water. No, fucker. I-I-I don't.

I don't. Oh, hold on, I'm looking up a photo. I'm looking up a photo of this as soon as I get it. Wait, so they're gonna have like stilted houses, like in a mangrove swamp or something. No, the idea is that the all of the houses are supposed to look like they're part of the mountain. Oh, okay. What a fucking bond villain shit.

Okay. Okay. And then you like step off your super yacht directly into your mountain fortress. Yeah, yes, more or less. This looks like a pixelated skyrim village. This looks, looks so ugly. It's like nothing to do. It's just like, yeah. No, no, like, there's a buildings that still sort of, I mean, it doesn't look like a mountain,

but yeah, you see these sort of test-related buildings around here in Beirut a couple times, but it works because it's so like out of place with the rest of the city's architecture. It does not work when the entire thing looks like that. It just looks odd. But just like plain backdrop. It's basically a sentence of exclamation points. And it's, let me tell you a little more about the amenities that are really designed

to foster human connection. Number one, number one amenity, equestrian and polo with state. Ha ha ha ha ha. Ride your horse off the super yacht, gotcha. Into this Simpson's house, which is cantilevered over the marina, next to 120 other Simpson's houses also cantilevered over the marina.

I just want to pause at this point to go back to all of the Neumarketing material, where's they're really hyping up now? They're really pushing the like, you know, what is Neum thing? They're doing promoted ads on Tumblr of all things, which is the funniest group of people you could get to move to Saudi Arabia.

Like what we're gonna get? I'll let they need furries. You know, they say, oh, we want true. We want the future of innovation at Neum, you will need furries. That's true. But the thing is, right, if you go back to that level of abstraction and that level of hype, the stuff that they talk about, even still, is like, this is going to change our ways of living. This is going to be the blueprint for like the city of the

21st century. You know, everybody is going to act and think differently about their own srs because of what we're doing in the test bed here in Neym. And what the test bed turns out to be is like jumping a horse off a super yacht into a pool. That's good. Well, they get this is like every time you think about Neym. So it's like, okay, we'd make about if the Saudi is trying to design a luxury suburb. That's because, right? That's why I think neon is so interesting and why we keep coming back to it and talking about it. It's because like so many things, it's interesting to see what the global, like the .000001% imagine is desirable living because it always ends up being different kinds of airport lounge just multiplied by between a thousand and a billion.

I get frustrated. I mean, this is a larger philosophical thing, but I get frustrated by how the super rich like no longer have a reputation for being sort of like, I don't know, I don't know, very concerned with the minutia of art and architecture and trying to see culture. They have less culture and less want to live deliciously in the way that generations of old would like to. They have to, like, this is, like, this is, I literally just said this, this is obscenely ugly.

I wish there's a look this up on Google, why you're listening to this? Why would you live there? Why would you want to? You can sort of think about AI in the same way that all these guys love both the kind of insane, rich people minimalism of like having an entirely like white empty house and just handing off little design details or things like that to AI so like nobody's involved in thinking about them and it's just like

thoughtlessly stealing somebody else and perversely right I think the last rich guy to care about the fixtures and fittings and making them not beautiful, but like he thinks they're beautiful, maybe Donald Trump, because I think he's insecure enough that like, and vain enough, that he's the only guy who's thinking, I want the like screen on the like, you know, private plane to like have a little Trump logo on it when it boots up kind of thing. Well, I want this escalator to be made of gold. It's tacky as fuck, but he's the only one thinking about these things.

Between new money and old money and he's trapped in this own kind of tardorous. No, no, I think it's good. So the style that you're talking about is properly called eco-modernism. And anytime any rich, weirdo plans an intentional community, they always go for eco-modernism. Like always, like Prospera was eco-modernist. Everything in Neom is eco-modernist. Like all of the strange cities

that we're talking about in Northern California, those like, well, actually that's an exception because that one is designed to be like a based, epic, walkable, trad city. But anything that's like all the other ones are eco-modernist, which is this strange empty hotel like way of living. A few more things, a few more things that the

Norlana offers. It offers luxury boutiques and art galleries. It offers an 18-hole signature golf course in what is supposed to be the most sustainable community in the entire in all of history. Okay. Sure, but again, though, like, that's nothing. Like, in some ways, this is a leveler

in that like fucking dentists play golf. Like, there comes a certain threshold of wealth, right? At which point, things like golf become accessible to you, where there is a decreasing difference between like owns five car dealerships and is Mohammed bin Salman. And that's insane. Well, it's because I think that it's is Mohammed bin Salman, I guess, because he can't imagine anything other than just being a bigger version of the guy owns five car dealerships. Is he's just like, okay, well, I guess what I'll do is all just all own hundreds of 18 whole golf courses.

I want 18,000 golf, 18,000 whole golf course. I also say two things. One is that the same things have an art gallery. It's not really like a bellweather of community and luxury because anyone who has ever been to like a plethora of art galleries will know that most art galleries are incredibly tacky and they feature a lot of pop art like Invenus for example there I would walk by constant art galleries quote-unquote which were just filled with like portraits of Mickey Mouse in like weird colors, or lots of portraits of the Joker, lots of portraits of the Joker. Every city I go to,

if you look in our gallery, there is a portrait of the Joker somewhere, it's actually quite astounding. That's what this is going to be. Yeah, we're going gonna have a bunch of Joker pop-up paintings facing out onto the Super Yacht. Yeah, and also, I mean, I hate to say this because I feel like many at home will disagree with me. I wish that there were more projects with like, weirder, more niche inspirations like the Poundland, that's the name of store, poundbeary. The thing is, you can't charge. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like that's, it's made with a certain sort of like mood and time period in mind.

It has a consistent architectural style, it's identifiable. It looks really uncomfortable to live in, but like at least there's like, there's a there's a there's a far process behind there with an ideology that is not just like, I love like, like, like minimalism and going into airport lounges. You're in a king's like nightmare of neoclassicism, but at the same time. Yeah, there's a vision. There is a vision, as opposed to just kind of like nihilism and like architecture firm grifting. Are we basically saying, say what you will about like base-trade, walkable poundberry,

at least it's an ethos? Basically, exactly. Yeah, if our sort of, if the fight of the future is between eco-modernism where everything looks like, you know, the house that Kanye West posts from, or like the theme parks in China that they made when money wasn't real, where they were just copying and pasting French chassos in like suburb design. Give me the second one, I guess. I hate both of them, but I would absolutely live in Chinese Paris

like what's real here. Let's not dance around. No, 100%. Anyway, anyway, I want to move. Now, we were going to talk about Neum towards the end, but we did dessert first today because we were already there. And now I'm going to be thinking about Paris brackets Chinese for the rest of the episode. So thank you for that, Shemus. It was my pleasure.

All right. So, last time, Shemus, we had you on. It was just after October 7th, and we spoke about sort of what Israel had been doing in Gaza, and we talked about, I'd say, the, I want to say chaos and short-sightedness, just on a strategic level that would lead to a huge amount more suffering in the region and expansion of the conflict. And let's say, undeterrable maximalism on the part of the Israeli government that the US was willing to end the US American allies were all but willing to encourage and tolerate rather than you know rein them in.

And I would say that a lot of what we talked about is about to happen on that episode has happened. And now that the conflict is spilling over or appears to be at risk of spilling over into sort of into neighboring countries, whether that is through activity in Yemen, through targeted assassinations in Lebanon or in fact, also just bombardment of towns in southern Lebanon by Israel. That's a new espaces in Iraq. I mean, this is all stuff that's already happening. And we're going to revisit this partly because we took a decision when that happened.

And we was like, we're what we know about is like British mostly media and sort of and the strange people that inhabit it as well as people like Bill Ackman. And so we're we will talk mostly about domestic, the domestic ramifications of this for now, but we're going back to the actual region for a time. Yeah. Once we have someone who knows what they're talking about, which we now, thankfully do. Yeah. So I guess I'll start by asking you this question, Shamus.

On October 8th, Israel was waging one kind of war. Do you think they're waging a different kind of war now? Um, I think, I, that's a very good question. I think so in the sense that the different kind of war, I think is far more dangerous to is a real I don't want to say survival as a nation because that I think buys into the narrative that they're pushing other own citizens, but I think it's survival in its current state. In the state that it has been commonly understood to exist in the past 75 or so years, what they are risking right now

by continuing to push and massacre into Gaza against right now in active international court of justice case against them for violating a genocide convention. They're pushing forward with that calling the people who back the case Nazis in South Africa as in league with Hamas. Pushing into Lebanon into a war that I don't think is really general who actually want to, they may, they of course would like to defeat Haspelab, but I think they know that that's a bad move to make, but they feel that their hands are being forced by the thousand people who have been displaced. They feel that that conflict is probably inevitable. They feel

that they need to bring in the United States to fight their war in Yemen for them to bring that war there. This is not a war that can be fought. This is a war that is being forced into a multi-front regional war that I am unsure. Israel society is prepared to deal with because what is the general propaganda strategy that Israel has deployed over the past 75 years. It's the idea that Israel is a Western nation that is as hostile and vision a bulwark against Arab barbarism. And it is a democratic nation that has a Western standard of living and is a professional fighting force. What we've seen so far is, I believe the numbers are 12,000 IDF soldiers are now disabled. Perhaps that number escalates to 20,000,

when we talk with you with PTSD. The IDF military sensor has attempted to cover up how many injuries there are. People coming out talking about how within 12 hours of them entering Gaza, their tanks were blown up, and they were named, their limbs had to be epitated. Then they have to go into the north and deal with a force that is far more better equipped and trained than Hamas with Esbola, the fact that they are going to have to deal with the knockdown effects of the Houthi blockade, Esbola in the North, Gaza in the South, and potentially whatever else that may come. And the international ramifications of the ICJ stuff too. Exactly.

This is going to be the next couple of years, I think, are going to be the next few years, next couple of years, I think are going to be extremely formative in the sense that the war that is being waged right now is going to create a society that is going to come to an extreme turning point. And I think it's going to become a nation that is more quote unquote liberal in the short term. In that, I don't think that, yeah, who is gonna survive the next election. I don't think the current government is gonna survive the next election. They absolutely hated.

But the environment that has been created against Palestinians, against Arabs, against Iran, I think it's gonna create a chimera of war and want for destruction that is irreparable. It's going to lead to something truly mortifying, beyond what we can comprehend. I've thought about this, too, because as far as the dynamic of the Israeli left versus the Israeli right, or the Israeli liberals versus the Israeli right, or Israeli liberals versus the Israeli right. Where for a long time this settlement was, I think a lot about the Nanyah who campaigned

where the Israelis are on the beach and he's batting threats away and stuff. And it's like, this is the deal, right? Is we do the kind of managed brutality, we do maintenance, we kind of like we mow the lawn, and in return you get to sort of like, be on the beach, you get to work, you know, developing apps or something. And you have this kind of like nice, ostensibly progressive in some ways, society, which is like untroubled by these things, right? And then that was just like instantly destroyed.

And I don't know what's downstream of this other than like you replace Netanyahu with like some kind of more ostensibly liberal and serious and maybe less personally corrupt guy who is now in charge of his society. Benning Gants. Yeah, exactly. Who is now in charge of his society, which is like 100% committed to exterminate the broods, you know? Yeah, no, like there was a billboard that just appeared today just to the illustrate that what's being discussed here where it's it's saying that Nenya who is good for the Arabs. The opposition here is not based on the fact Nenya who is waging a war of extermination.

The opposition is that Netanyahu is endangered as a railees by taking his eyes off the ball in Gaza. It is always, yeah, the opposition is always in the direction of there needs to be more done against the Palestinian. It's never from the perspective that almost never from the perspective that it should be, that a different strategy of possibly reconciliation or more rights or negotiation should be pursued. I mean, the Israeli left, which Alice had the corrector herself from saying, because the Israeli left, the Israeli.

Yeah, it's so marginal, beyond, I think, when many people can comprehend. And even within that marginal left, the things that we would traditionally see as left-wing of the context of a partite South Africa, for example. In a partite, there were lots of Africaners who were not only working against a partite, but they were literally with the African National Congress. People like Joe Slovo, that's a famous example of somebody who was technically a white settler in South Africa. He was from that sort of lineage and he was a communist leader. He was a militant leader with the African National Congress with the communists and he fought apartheid that way. Then we contrast that with Israel here, and after three months of genocide,

the only person, there's only been one person so far who has refused to come up to military service with the idea of one person. And even within that context, the statement that was put out by that refusenic, put the equal blame on both Hamas and Israel for the war that is being wedged. Like, Israeli left here is kind of, it's a different ball game there than previous conflicts. Yeah, I do want to note one thing that struck me,

which is sort of calling Netanyahu, like effectively like an arrow blower, right? It's like reminded me of a bit from China, Mirville's history of the Russian Revolution, where he talks about some graffiti that's like, deposed the Zhu Karensky in Storkomrade Trotsky, which is funny because Karensky isn't Jewish and Trotski is. And it's just like, oh, okay, these things are now perfectly inverted where it's like, you know,

Netanyahu's problem is he's too soft. Or by being hard in the wrong way, he gave the Arabs what they wanted. Exactly. That's what I see as well. Yeah. You know, he was, he was was hard but not smart about being hard. And this is also something that I've been thinking of. We talk on the show a lot about political processes

being only one way. That things can only ratchet up. We see that in the UK a lot. Nothing can ever be refunded, but it can always be made more efficient. In the same way, right? We see the when we talked about this in on our sort of early October episode, when we spoke to Shamist last, was the history of the Israeli government, especially in the last couple of decades, has been to constantly, especially since 2008, has been constantly to ratchet up tensions and to

always escalate with both with neighbors, with Palestinians, because there really is no other logic remain. And with your allies too, I mean, this has been the thing with the US time and time and time again, is the US kind of like sets red lines. You go through the red lines, they set new red lines, and you kind of go through those until as long as it takes for them to like actually make any substantive threats. Now with Biden and the White House, a man who will say yes to everything, it's just kind of things are progressing to this point where you have Israeli officials talking

seriously about this idea of a US-led multinational peacekeeping coalition in Gaza under IDF operational control, which is, it's lunacy, it's pure lunacy. No, I mean, for one thing, for one thing, Alice, I think you'd stop with the fucking lies that you're spouting about Biden saying, guess to everything, I think you should know that he had his officials say that there should not be a forceful displacement from Gaza. And I think that's strong a disagreement as anyone has ever given in this entire war. I've sort of like undisouled his heroism on that one, you're right.

Yeah, I know. I'm just trying to put it up for the man. But this, and just as well, with like the multitude of different plans that have been put forward by Israel for Gaza, none of which seem to be at all consistent with one another. I'm kind of in awe and I'm wondering like, I feel like there has to be at some point something that would make the United States put its foot down, not out of I guess, I'm a love for the Palestinians because I don't think it exists. But like the idea that this is beyond objects even for us And my belief about what that point would be keeps moving. And I don't know what it would be because if the only thing they seem to be able to

muster up is that they would like a not there to be a giant city of refugees in the north of Sinai for all the gods to be. Even though apparently refugees in the northern sign eye for all the gossips to be. Even though, apparently there is a port of a USA official in November asking about the viability of it. So clearly they considered the so-and-so one point to try and temper things down. If that isn't like a point in which you would not even consider, then what would it be? I would like to know. I think that's something that in a trepidjournalist should ask them directly, like a point in which you would not even consider, then what would it be? I would like to know. I think that's something that in a trepid journalist

should ask them directly, but I don't think it's gonna happen. Yeah, well, if you wanna talk about other plans that they've had, Israeli officials have been reported to hold clandestine talks with Congo and Rwanda to accept sort of gazines. When, and this is Gila Gamliyo who said this at the nest set,

at the end of the war, the Hamas rule will collapse. There'll be no municipal authorities. The civilian population will be entirely dependent in the unhumanitarian aid. There'll be no work and 60% of Gaza's agricultural land will become security buffer zones. The Gaza problem is not just our problem. The world should support humanitarian emigration because it's the only solution idea.

And just to add on to that, Congo then denies they were having talks. Then there are reports that Chad and then Marwanda were doing talks and then Chad and Rwanda all denied it. Nobody wants to be associated with this, which makes me think that Egypt keeps ratcheting up as maybe the eventual choice because maybe they'll just have them flood the border and they'll force it open because I don't think anybody else is going to take this deal. Yeah, and I mean that's going to potentially collapse the Egyptian government as well. I mean, the thing is insoluble as it is because the only possible lasting solution, and in some ways it's kind of already too late, is to cease the invasion and pull back out of Gaza and then negotiate. And that, because the Israelis have ruled that out, all we have left to either,

you know, sort of dancing around the prospect of kill everyone and then just bort those it into the ocean, which I think is the way to interpret all of these like voluntary recessal men's games, right, is as sort of like more, as ways of laundering that idea is to say, well, we've been through the role of Dex, we've tried all of these different countries, these are people who know and will take, therefore, what choice did we have? Exactly. Yeah, it's either something that's intended to run cover for that or it's just a way of running down the clock,

of wasting time, of saying, well, we're thinking about what the plan is for the day after, when there is no plan because there can be no plan, and the plan is just to continue killing. Well, I say there is a plan, it's just the plan can never be acknowledged. But yeah, I mean, this is the thing, like I don't know, right?

I think like, I sort of changed by the day on whether I think that there is like, acknowledged plan anywhere within the Israeli government to, like, forcibly, permanently depopulate guards of Palestinians, or whether there is, like, it's in such chaos and incompetence that it's sort of, like, lurching towards that accidentally. And that's, you know, I worry that that's the kind of question that like future historians are going to have to debate about. But like, in terms of the material effect, it's exactly the same. And it's wild because, you know, a lot of genocides in history that, you know, I think it's

uncommon amongst them that you can so directly and so obviously lay the blame at like one specific dudes Like door and Joe Biden here has like the single most responsibility for for this happening I the argument that I keep hearing a lot from liberals, even still, is that Trump would be far worse from Palestinians. And yet I read an article like literally just today, often, having the post, and the line that a US official, he spoke anonymously with a half post, the line that he used was the problem is no one can reign in Biden. Yeah, it's it's it's like such an individual thing. And in some ways, it kind of defies like a material analysis or whatever, because it's just one guy who I don't know read something

that made him like this or like it's just sort of like maybe maybe that remembering the 70s. Remembering what the times before were, because again, this is the same thing that governs the Israeli feeling of invincibility within its own country. If you grew up and you were an adult in the 70s, what was Israel to you? You grew up in a country that had beaten back so many different Arab nations not once twice Your country not only occupied the West Bank and Gaza but parts of Syria, which you would eventually annex You had occupied the Sinai Peninsula you were building settlements there you were displacing better ones Your entire life had been governed by this idea that you were the most powerful military

in the region, if not on the continent. Your soldiers were feared and respected and seen as God kings. And this idea that you could do anything wrong is a fucking shock to your system and is incomprehensible. And Joe Biden didn't grow up and his really isn't Israeli. But when he talks about how if an Israel didn't exist, we would have to create one to pursue our interest. And he says that blatant. Like he clearly bogs into this myth himself. And I don't end when he talked and he believes Israeli intelligence

And when he talked and he believes Israeli intelligence completely about things like al-Shifa and the Beheaded Babies and Rocket Strike that hit Al-Ahli at her hospital, he has no inclination to entertain any other narrative. And this is the thing like, okay, Trump obviously is a big fan of Israel, but in practice, in practice, I struggle to see what the difference would be because if Israel is being held back by Biden, what I don't understand, what, because what are the, what are the definable effects?

Is real of Biden's pressure? They don't even, this is the other thing is the flip side of that same coin is that he is providing all of this cover for them. He is doing all this for them and they can't stand them. They hate him for it Because the only people who believe that Biden is exercising effective control on Israel or on the IDF are Israelis. No, no, I mean, American like in a Marbenzvere, I follow them on telegrams. So I get alerts in my phone, right? And I remember seeing one where he was like, you know, America's our best friend, but we are not a star on the American flag.

Like we're gonna do what we need to do here. Like yeah, God, the definable effects here, that Israel is losing its mind over already that it had to do was that it stopped giving vague, vague evacuation orders, and it made a grid of evacuation orders that it could define, which changed absolutely nothing. It just meant that there were specific numbers. And then they let in more humanitarian aid into Gaza, but still not nearly enough to prevent the worst famine that is ongoing in history.

And even then, the humanitarian aatrox are not really there to feed people. They're doing the absolute bare minimum because that was the quote unquote agreement that Biden and these really government came to about how they would keep supporting the war. It's still in furtherance of continuing to massacre people. It's not in honest attempt to come to an equilibrium of some kind. We're in offset effects. I'm frustrated. I'm continuous.

I need to keep myself from getting frustrated because I did this on chopper trap. And then people said I sounded like Jordan Peterson. That's fine. We don't care. So I mean, this is the thing though, right? Is the thing that strikes me about Biden, the other thing, is this being a kind of like weird individual sort of like set of prejudices that he has means that he is so far outside the bounds of the blob.

So you get this point where you have these rumblings of CIA-associated Congress people and retired military and stuff, having these kind of quite hesitant statements that's like, well, are we sure this is sustainable? You have allies like France and even to an extent in the UK being like, well, we support Israel's right to do all the horrible things, but in a slightly more targeted way. And none of it gets through to him at all. You also have people from the State Department

like submitting letters of dissent. I'm reminded of the episode we did with Joseph about like the having to be involved in the administration of empire, but you are a good like Alger his style liberal and there's no McCarthy to come wash you out of the state. I think this is being absolutely being perceived in the kind of like more lib and even just like more pragmatic bits of the US government apparatus as like the democratic version of the Muslim ban, right? Is this something that is so obviously like criminal

and self sabotaging and stupid. And you know, as with the Muslim ban, the effect of this kind of like internal dissent and internal protest is gonna be next to nothing. So What what what I sort of wonder if it's gonna happen is Biden out Trump in Chris Rufo appointed Special special investigator who then questions everybody in Congress if they're a closet anti-Semite everybody in Congress, if they're a closet anti-semit. Oh, my God.

Oh, excuse me, everybody in the State Department who signed these melee mouthed letters of protest and then continued doing their jobs anyway, right? That's, that is sort of, if you like, overstatement for effect, but having sort of see these kinds of mass moral panics in service of an imperial goal, even if the imperial goal contravenes the sort of ostensible purpose of empire to increase the prestige, power, and

security of the United States and its associated interests in the world. I mean, you could see that this is doing the complete opposite of that. We talked about these, we talk about pariah states, like North Korea, well, we're witnessing the creation of a pariah state, right? Fucking now. But going back to the, you know, sort of as you say, the domestic sort of high political response, you know, this is, this is self-defeating at every, at every single level. I mean, this is, it's poorly managed empire, right? And which of course, offends the people who want a well managed empire. Yes, precisely.

And this, what I want to go back to is something I said earlier, which is the logic of only being able to escalate. That results in poorly managed empire. And that creates these kind of, I guess, internal, internal fractiousness. And, you know, the, and so they are unable, or unable, unable and unwilling to do anything about it.

And it's also like, you can kind of look at this as the culmination of a long series of failures in the management of empire, right, by American presidents, where sort of like, both developments in Israel, developments in Gaza and within the federal government all kind of conspired to make it so that Israel had a far right government whose like leash could no longer be pulled on meaningfully, right? And you know, was then supported by presidential administration that didn't want to do it anyway. And I, this is going to sound like such

an axe to grind, right? But this is true. I swear to God, this is true. A large part of this is directly the fault of Hillary Clemson. Yeah. Oh my god. This, this, the amount of when, when she went on, when she started talking again, God knows why about Hamas and she wrote this up, that about why Hamas needs to be stopped. And she was talking about Palestinian, I think, getting different types of alons, women getting types of alons. Yeah, yeah, she worked with like women getting microloans. And it's like, oh, Yeah, yeah, yeah. She worked with like women getting micro loans and it's like, micro loans. And this is like, are you talking about this? Wait, she was, she was a secretary of state as a consolation prize after running one of

the most races, yeah, after running one of the most, one of the most racist presidential campaigns in history, losing anyway, and then was entrusted with the job of managing American diplomatic and foreign policy. And her sort of party piece for doing that in relation to Palestine was, why don't we try and rig the elections in Gaza to force Hamas out and maintain the sort of unissary power under the PA, which did not work and led to all of the PA's guys and guys are being killed. And Hamas taking power, it just like because she tried to overturn the election. I just like no, no, no, no, Hillary Clinton. It's she is, I think the most like malignant aspect of this lack of understanding

of the Palestinian existence. But it's the same Bolshev that has permeated the whole view from the West, from Israel, about what the Palestinians are capable of at function as. Like basic question and you guys can say yes or no depending on what you guys believe. Are the Palestinians human beings? This is true. It's like a weird thing. Yes, of course. Are they human beings who have thoughts and they have feelings and they have the ability to form social groups? Like, let's for real here. This is true. Like this is a, this is a basic

objective fact. So if I am to say to you that the Palestinians who have continuously resisted foreign oppression for 75 years without stop, when I present the idea to you that we need to overthrow their elected government and install a new one, and we're just going to hope that they're going to like not react. Most like even if I love Fata, and I love President Mahmoud Abbas, and I think Hamas is the worst thing since sliced bread. A normal person is going to tell you, that sounds like a bad idea that is going to create an infinite amount of problems knocked out effects that we are not going to be per- Fata told them this.

And it didn't go in the first throw and it didn't, she doesn't, because she's incompetent and she doesn't know what she's fucking doing. But this is the, this is the, like, Fata told her this too. The Palestinian Authority told her this, and they didn't want to do it. Their intelligence services didn't want to do it because they knew it would get a bunch of their guys killed and hand to massed like even more power and Gaza. Uh, and, and she sort

of got them to do it anyway, which was a sort of predictable result. The, and the, the currently you see kind of reverberations of this of this stupidity right now and at least one of the plans that is really is putting forth the idea that the people okay so is we are probably doesn't have the manpower and the mandate to annex Gaza at least it's correct juxtapher so the plan that they're saying is that prominent families in Gaza clans drives that everyone to call them can do the governing for us and conduct civil matters. Even though this was not only a plan that was tried before in the 70s and the West Bank

and it didn't work, because they were seen as collaborators, yeah. And not only was this a plan that was put forth, I don't much, larger scale in South Africa with the Banquistans, this was also the reason why Hamas was so popular in 2006 was not only because of opposition to the FATTA and the elected government, but also because these prominent families had a lot of outsized power and Hamas promised to reign the men.

Like what they keep doing these plans that they've already tried before and failed because they think that oh, this time like they'll get it like what What's the I don't know I it's I Wish I don't wish that they were better, but like I wondering why they aren't they nerd smarter about this But this is the thing there is no smart plan left that like there is no smart plan that works that doesn't cross some some like Red line of like this is incompatible with the sort of like broader reason of like, what Israel is, what the United States is, and what their policies

are going to be, right? Like, the same reason that the two state solution is dead, right? Because there was no deal that Israel would have agreed to. In the same, you know, by the same token, I mean, even the office that they've made in the past, they wouldn't agree to now, even if there was anyone on the Palestinian side who would take them. But it's the same thing with Yemen, right? This was sort of like, the who these attacking shipping and the Red Sea was eminently preventable, if this is like to take the kind of like well-managed empire of you for a second and be like this is something that should have been avoided, right?

It was very easily avoided by the process of having any kind of overarching strategy, any kind of plan, and the Biden administration doesn't have on it. It has a thing of like lurching from crisis to crisis and this is the next crisis, right? And whatever solution rises to that is going to be something else that's insane and unsustainable, because the sensible plan there, which is to give the hosies what they want, which is to exercise some meaningful control on Israel, is unacceptable. So all we can do is this kind of impossible shit of, I guess, missile strikes on people who have been getting bombed by the Saudis for years at this point with the same weapons

that we're going to attack them with, and that's going to do something, maybe. We can only do what we've been doing, but bigger and more. Yes, yeah. Essentially. And, you know, this is something I was thinking about as well, when we were talking about like, well, they're, they want to just do the Ban-to-Stan plan again. They've tried, that has been tried elsewhere in here and never works because it's basically just corruption lottery

for like 22 families or whatever. I mean, we did in Pakistan, it still has, or something that was done in Pakistan, it still has reverberations to this day, right? Which is that you, what the Hillary Clinton style of view here is you, is that you've, you've, you've identified the one institution that's causing all the problems, you change that institution

and then everyone's so distracted by their micro loan business that, that the poison is removed. It's interesting, by the way, to, we were talking about Trump earlier and how Trump wouldn't be any different. And it's, as far as Republicans and Democrats go, in my reading on this, one thing I found is a kind of strange fact, which is that the sort of various Palestinian, like, PA delegations to the US of negotiations, found that pretty much the only person who

took them seriously was of all people, Condoleezza Rice. So there's this weird space in, or they used to be anyway in the Republican party where it was possible to like think about these things because the control of what Israel, Palestine, policy was going to be on the Democratic Party was like, you know, vice grip tight, whereas Republicans didn't give a shit. And so therefore, you know, it could be a bit more flexible in their own ways. I disagree. I think, kind of Lisa Rice, which is a great front, was a great friend of the global South.

And so others in the beautiful, but star-crossed love of her and Mark Adafi. They were gonna create a United States of Africa to get the f**k out of here. She would have been his queen and she was crazy than him and went back to the Joker. Lisa, Lisa! So just to finish off with the last maybe 10 minutes,

I wanted to discuss how the sort of body politic of the US and UK were absorbing what's going on. Because I mean, we've spoken about, I mean, we've been speaking about Bill Ackman for years, but he has now become a kind of, we've seen him become a sort of a right-wing minor celebrity. Yeah, again, a bit like Elon Musk, like one of these sort of high-value targets of radicalization, and this is like way downstream, culturally of this, you know?

And what has been interesting to me, at least, looking out to the US, is that I see now happening, but centered in elite universities, rather than in a political party, kind of what happened in 2018 over here. The, I'd say widespread acceptance that there is a kind of an actively anti-Semitic undercurrent that is somehow infiltrated some previously respectable pillar of society. In the UK, obviously, that was the labor party. And the US, that is now like the woke universities.

And it's strange because both are about, the opinions of sort of, let's say opposition to what Israel's doing in Gaza. And yet what's sort of strange is that the target of the universities, they're actually just, you know, they're big hedge funds. They're not actually sort of doing anything sort of to try to meaningfully oppose what Israel is doing in Gaza. They're not actually particularly left-wing.

They're just favorite targets of conservatives and obsessed over by liberals. Meanwhile, in the UK, the sort of moral panic tends to be more directed at street protests, but in both cases, it's being metabolized as this, this thing happening in the Middle East is being metabolized as there is a clear and present danger to the continuation of a safe society here in either the UK or the US. So what I was just going to ask in fact, both of you is, how do you see these two tendencies as similar or different? Like do you think I'm off base in seeing like my, in comparing what's going on at universities

in the US now, what happened here in 2018. Yeah, I think the difference is that like, different kind of like different boots, different necks, right? In the UK, I think it's very much ahead against any kind of like mass popular opinion or even like the concept of mass popular protest. Like we had a very large Diane on Westminster Bridge yesterday and Keir Starmer's response to that being asked about that was well we've had MPs be assassinated before, which is nonsense, but it's also it also reveals that like these are not people to him. Okay, they're not not people in the same way the Palestinians are people to him, but they're not people,

and the people are, you know, MPs, MPs, staff. But they're not serious people. Yeah, for sure. And as such, they shouldn't have any role in politics and the concept of them having any role in politics, even like pretending to die outside the building is threatening and is violent and is sort of like going to destabilize

the serious politics being done by the serious politics doers. Contrast that with the US, I think what's happening in the US is an attempt to kind of like lock down future, well present and future elite opinion, right, is to say that like you cannot express any hesitation about Israel's genocide and remain, sort of like, remain president of Harvard because we're going to find some kind of, like, academic J-walking plagiarism bullshit. And you can't, like, do this and remain a student at Harvard or wherever because we're going to have the truck that docks us you.

And therefore, we're going to do our level best to, like, keep you out of the elite. I don't know, know though that really reflects anything about the different power structures in those societies, other than that, in Britain it's more familiar to try and just kind of crack down on process more generally. So the reason I draw the comparison is, because I see them both as kind of sea change moments where this particular idea becomes totally embedded

and in escape of course. The similarity, I see a lot of similarities, but they're both in that they're both distractions from the actual thing that they're trying to attack, right? I mean, they talk, obviously the discussion is focused throughout Israel and the fact that disagreeing with this criticizing Israel is itself anti-Semitism.

But with Corbin, it was about the idea that he was a socialist and that he was offering a real ideological shift change and therefore him being a Jew hater, overwhelmed all of that. But here, yeah, I mean, it's about, it's obviously it's about Israel, but when these anti-Semitism discussions come up, they feel exceptionally disconnected from that in of itself. It becomes a more vague sort of accusation. And what's happening in Gaza is de-emphasized in favor of the concerns about a kind of general

quote unquote campus safety, whatever that means. And I have the same thing with the safety you know, the safety within the labor party. And the actual safety concerns that they express, if I can be frank, do not strike me as terribly concerned. I guess more just about having to witness other people have different opinions than you in public. But while what is happening, also the entire educational system has been militarily

destroyed. IDF soldiers brag about the fact that this will overthing up and they kill professors in university presidents and students. There's no, I understand the ramifications of these kinds of discussions and how bad they are and that they should be carried about. But I'm angry that, like you said, like a J-walking violation essentially. And yet we have to have these stories come back up

and come back out about Claude and Gay that I keep having to see. And then I go into the comments on Reddit on these posts and there are people with thousands of love posts talking about like, well, you know, there should not be someone who is plagiarizing, who is leading one of our nation's leading institutions. Like what, these are conversations,

they extract them from the primary causes, which are major, and then they make them into just naval gazing nonsense. It happens over and over again. Because you're only able to naval gaze when you are in the throes of, I think, an imperial catastrophe, not just, I mean, just a catastrophe for the empire, though it is, but a catastrophe that the empire is visiting on others. You have to start thinking about plagiarism,

otherwise you will have to think about what's actually happening. Because the New York Times will have to, it loves talking about the plagiarism thing because that is a drama, it's a drama, it can understand, it's a drama that it can debate without crossing red lines about its own sort of editorial support for American empires, the same thing in the UK.

We can talk about, we can endlessly talk about whether or not street protesters are chanting slogans that are exactly in line with what is acceptable, right? That's how we're metabolizing it, right? We're metabolizing it as basically our street protesters sufficiently polite and differential. You know, the US is just metabolizing it even more ridiculously and abstractly in some kind of a homework debate.

There is nothing more I think that they can look at. Because to look beyond these questions of basically appropriateness will be to look into the real world, which they will never do. Yeah. into the real world, which they will never do. Yeah. They... These discussions about like protest tactics in particular.

I know I'm preaching a little choir here, but whenever somebody brings up the fact that blocking roads distracts people from their cause, it makes people not support them, bothering people, I guess, with chanting on the subway, it makes people not support them, bothering people, I guess, with chanting on the subway, makes people not support them. I have literally never heard of a case in which someone who otherwise would have supported Palestine was distracted away from that cause because someone made him life for work or bothered him on the subway by being too loud. That is not somebody who otherwise would have entertained your position. That is someone who will already disagree with you.

Anyway, I think that's all we have time for for today, but, Shemus, once again, I want to thank you so much for coming and talking to us about this topic. It also neal help. It feels like a long time ago. Always an honor. And of course, if people want to hear more shameless or read more shameless, in this case, where can they go? They can go to shameless-malagastole.com.

And if they want to see how to spell that, they can, I guess, copy and paste it from this episode. That's right. I also want to thank you out there for listening to the first free episode of 2024, recorded in 2024, and that we will see you on the bonus in a few short days, where we will be talking about the strange death of the Hyperloop with, well, there's your problems very own, Justin Ross. It's a good podcast.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. We actually have two, we have two hosts of, well, there's your problems very own, Justin Rossini. That's a good podcast. That's a good podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We actually have two hosts of, well, there's your problem, gasting. Wow, Alice unfortunately won't be able to join us because she's busy gasting on a podcast, and I don't know which one. Yeah, so some great things are important.

Anyway, thank you everyone for listening. Thank you again, Shamus, for coming on. And we'll see you in a few days. Bye, all days. Bye. Bye. you