Thread by @caitoz

The Empire Attacks BDS For The Same Reason Nixon Started The Drug War

"Anyone of sufficient influence who is far enough outside the capitalist, imperialist consensus worldview will necessarily find themselves similarly targeted"
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-empire-a…

The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that Arkansas' anti-BDS law violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, because it plainly does.
mondoweiss.net/2021/02/arkans…

This is an important victory for civil rights defenders and for Palestinian rights activists, but it's just one battle in a much larger war.

https://twitter.com/intifada/status/1357407703338000385

.@joshruebner writes the following for @intifada:

So we can expect the attacks on BDS and other Palestinian rights activism to continue with extreme aggression. Anti-imperialists often attribute this campaign to Israel's role in the western empire's geostrategic agendas in the Middle East, and that's certainly a big part of it;

But another major motive behind these attacks which doesn't get enough attention is to sabotage and undermine the left in the western world, in much the same way as the "war on drugs" was originally intended to do.

In 2016 the late journalist and author Dan Baum revealed something that he'd been told in 1994 by former top Nixon advisor and Watergate co-conspirator John Ehrlichman (emphasis added):
harpers.org/archive/2016/0…

"We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities."

In much the same way, those in charge of the capitalist empire could never get away with outlawing support for socialism and opposition to imperialism, but they can target things that socialists and anti-imperialists happen to support in order to disrupt the left.

Last month the prominent Israeli civil rights organization B'Tselem published an analysis finding that "the bar for labeling the Israeli regime as apartheid has been met."
btselem.org/publications/f…

Anyone who moves a sufficient distance to the left of the mainstream so-called "center" will necessarily find themselves in opposition to a right-wing government with institutionalized apartheid.

By taking this natural consequence of sincere leftism and labeling it "anti-Semitism", the imperial propaganda engine has given itself a bludgeon with which to attack every part of the ideological spectrum which opposes capitalism and imperialism.

In the same way, it hasn't been neo-Nazis and other right wing extremists who've wound up targeted by the dishonest conflation of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, it's been peace activists and the left, whether that be on college campuses or in politics.

https://twitter.com/DerbyChrisW/status/1291628890117603328?s=20

The strongest example of the latter is of course the UK's Jeremy Corbyn, who through a series of odd accidents found himself within spitting distance of leading a major western power as an anti-imperialist socialist.

Anyone of sufficient influence who is far enough outside the capitalist, imperialist consensus worldview will necessarily find themselves similarly targeted for their inevitable opposition to Israeli apartheid,

This weapon will continue to be used against the left, not only to support Israel but to prevent the rise of any political movements in powerful western nations which would threaten the capitalist, imperialist world order.