Truth 3: Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against millions of Palestinians. Discrimination against Palestinians and confiscation of their land, including in East Jerusalem, is one of the triggers of this latest round of violence. One should not ignore this context.
– Mark Ruffalo Retweeted, 19 May
“Equality, human rights, and prosperity for all from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.” The fight for equality happening here in the USA should be the guiding principle of our values in the Middle East and for our allies abroad.
– Mark Ruffalo, 20 May
Please watch @MehdiHasanShow special on the Middle East is the clarity we need in the fog or war. Why is this happening? How did we get here? What’s actually happened? Has it been fair? What about the children? What can the USA do stop this ongoing conflict?
– Mark Ruffalo, 20 May
I have reflected & wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing “genocide”. It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful & is being used to justify antisemitism here & abroad.
-Mark Ruffalo, 25 May
Now, it is perfectly clear that Israel is not committing genocide, for the obvious reason that it isn’t. The 400-percent growth of the Palestinian population since 1950 is more than sufficient to disprove the accusation. That being said, I strongly suspect that if Americans were to require the Jews resident in the United States to live in a pair of large ghettos under conditions similar to those that the Israelis force the Palestinians to live in Gaza and the West Bank, such an action would be described as genocide too.
So remember, as always, there is no information content in rhetoric. Rhetoric concerns emotional manipulation, not factual accuracy or logical consistency, which is why the slaves of Hell always attempt to reserve the more effective rhetorical weapons for themselves while simultaneously denying the use of the same terms to others even when they are perfectly apposite.
The irony is that Israel is literally a national socialist state, as Zionism is a historical revision of the global socialism of the neoclowns now resident in the United States. It’s not very different than the post-Lenin conflict between Stalin’s national communism and Trotsky’s world revolution. But only those whose minds are firmly established in the dialectic are capable of reading that simple factual statement without spiralling immediately into cognitive dissonance, because the rhetorical antithesis between “Nazi” and “Jew” has been so firmly established that most people can’t even get their heads around the historical fact that the world’s first national socialist party was established in China prior to the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and had nothing whatsoever to do with the scattered remnants of a minor Middle Eastern tribe.
In fact, as it happens, explicitly national socialist parties were established in both China and Britain prior to the 1919 founding of the German National Socialist Workers Party.
But those who are engaged in rhetorical wars are always aggressively uninterested in the actual facts of history.
UPDATE: On the other hand, Ruffalo’s genuflection only rates a 4/10 on the cringe scale in comparison with John Cena’s 7/10 public self-flagellation:
“I have to say something very, very, very important now. I love and respect China and Chinese people. I’m very, very sorry about my mistake. I apologise, I apologise, I’m very sorry. You must understand that I really love, really respect China and the Chinese people. My apologies. See you.”