08/11/14 – Brendan O’Neill – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, on the line we have our friend Brendan O'Neill.
He is the editor of Spite Online, that's Spite-Online.com.
They're in England and they got a whole bunch of great writers and great stuff there.
And actually, let me ask you first of all a little bit, could I ask you, and I think we've discussed this in the past, Brendan, but it's been a long time and I forget and get confused.
Could you describe y'all's, you know, more or less, broadly speaking, y'all's political pedigree a little bit?
Because you seem to always be against every US, UK military intervention, going back at least through the 90s, really good on everything.
And so that means there must be something really wrong with you that makes you that consistent about what's really wrong with the empire.
We refer to ourselves as Marxist libertarians, so we come from a Marxist background.
There used to be a magazine called Living Marxism, which is where Spite comes from.
And we are also libertarian.
So we support freedom, freedom of speech, freedom in everyday life, the right of people to organize their own affairs free from state intervention.
So put those two things together and you have Marxist libertarian.
So like anarcho-communists, kind of?
Yeah, kind of like that, yeah.
Maybe not that far?
Maybe not that kind of zany.
We're more into reading and thinking and being hopefully quite clever about things.
But yeah, we come from a left-wing background, but we are devoted to freedom, as leftists used to be, by the way.
So we see ourselves as very traditional old leftists, kind of 19th century style leftists.
And I think that really explains, too, why you have such this kind of head-on conflict with the humanitarian, do-good or liberal interventionists, right?
That's right, because they are the opposite of us in many ways.
They do not trust people to be able to run their own affairs.
They don't think people can survive without external intervention, especially stupid people in Africa and Asia.
And they want to send militaries or NGOs or other Western institutions to prop up people's lives, to build states on behalf of people, and basically to look after people in a very colonialist way.
So we are very opposed to humanitarian intervention.
All right, good times.
And we're going to get to Iraq, I guess, probably in the second segment here.
And by the way, I never did get a chance to interview you about the kind of right-wing and populist parties being elected all across Europe, and you had a really good write-up on that a couple of few months ago, and I still would like to talk with you about that sometime.
Cool.
I know you were a bit under the weather right around that time.
We'll get back to that, though, because that's very interesting stuff, too.
But anyway, I wanted to ask you about this article that you wrote about the Gaza War and anti-Semitism, and the way you wrote it, I'm not sure, Brendan, if you left much room for somebody like me, who's not anti-Semitic in the slightest bit.
I even married a Jew, I like Jews so much.
But man, I hate Israel, and I can't stand them.
Every couple of years, going on these canned hunt raids like they're Dick Cheney, murdering kids and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
And so, I really appreciated your takedown of all the liberal hypocrites who, oh, they care so much about Gaza, but they don't care about anybody else the empire's killing anywhere else, but for some reason, this is their special issue.
I appreciate that, and I'll let you talk about that if you want, but I just wonder whether you think there's much room for a point of view like mine in this, too.
Yeah, I don't think everyone who's opposed to Israel is anti-Semitic, I mean, that would be an outrageous thing to say.
I'm very interested in the hypocrisy, as you say, of liberals, particularly in Europe, who didn't say anything about the bombing of Libya.
They had said nothing, they supported the attack on Yugoslavia in 1999.
They were pretty favorable about the war in Afghanistan in 2001.
They had some problems with the war in Iraq, but, you know, not a huge problem.
And then whenever Israel does anything, they go crazy, they take to the streets, they start screaming, they start going mad, they start tweeting every hour of the day about how much they hate Israel.
So it got me thinking, why is it that there is this double standard?
Why do liberals and lots of left-wingers only get angry when Israel takes military action?
Why not when America does, or Britain, or France, or other states?
And so I think Israel has become a kind of whipping boy.
It's become a whipping boy for Western colonial guilt.
And what you have is all these kind of Westerners who feel pretty shitty about the countries they live in, about the history of their nations, you know.
And what they see in Israel is the perfect demonic evil figure that they can rail against and attack and scream at and feel good about themselves.
You know, it looks very simplistic.
It looks very black and white.
Let's scream at Israel and feel good for an hour.
It's much more difficult, of course, to talk about our own governments and what they are doing.
That's much more complex.
But it's easy to shout at Israel.
So I'm just very suspicious of the one-sidedness of the anti-Israel movement.
Yeah, there's a lot of that.
But then again, I mean, liberals and leftists, and, you know, I'm not one at all, so it's not like I'm trying to carry water for them too bad.
But pretty much, liberals and leftists come from a very civil rights-y, non-racist, very politically correct kind of point of view themselves.
And so, you know, what percentage of any of this is really, I mean, I can definitely see the partisanship angle.
Don't you talk bad about my Barack Obama who kills a Gaza war worth of people every week for the last six years or whatever.
But as far as the anti-Semitism, I mean, maybe it's different in Europe, but I don't see a lot of Jew hatred among liberals and leftists and progressives in America.
I think it is different in Europe.
I think it's worse in Europe than it is in America or Australia, or even worse than in some parts of the Arab world, where there have been relatively muted protests about Israel.
But in Europe, we, you know, we've seen people in Paris smashing synagogues.
We've had anti-Semitic slogans painted on the synagogues in Germany and in Belfast in Northern Ireland.
We have seen shops, Jewish shops being smashed in Belgium.
You know, there have been a spate of violent attacks that are explicitly anti-Semitic, and they've all been justified in terms of anti-Zionism.
These people have said, we're really just angry with the Zionists, and that's why we're doing all this stuff against Jewish institutions.
So when that happens, and it's happening very regularly in Europe at the moment, I think it's incumbent on liberals and progressives to take a step back and say, what is going on here?
And is there any relationship between the way in which we single out Israel as the most evil state and the way in which this kind of new form of anti-Semitism is rising to the surface?
I think there is a relationship between those two things.
That's not to say that everyone who opposes Israel is anti-Semitic.
You're not.
Lots of people aren't.
But I think when people focus on Israel as the most evil state, the only state that kills children, the only state that punishes innocent civilians, then I think it's not surprising that some people think, ah, that's the Jewish state, so the Jews must also be the most evil people in the world.
And I think we've unleashed a pretty dangerous sentiment in Europe in particular.
Well, you know, I worry that Israel's behavior ends up just normalizing this kind of thing more and more and more.
I remember when I first started reading Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com, I thought, oh, man, good.
This thing that Donald Rumsfeld did this week, you know, I guarantee Justin's next article is going to be about that.
I can't wait.
And then it would be about Israel again.
And I finally started wondering, well, maybe this guy actually, because that's what we're all brought up to believe.
Criticism of Israel means criticism of Jews just, you know, hiding or whatever.
And then I came to realize, like, no, he's really got a bone to pick with Sharon that I did not understand about how much influence they had here and just how bad their policies were.
And now we've got to go to break.
We'll be right back.
Brendan O'Neill, SpikedOnline.com.
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It's Brendan O'Neill from SpikedOnline, that's Spiked-Online.com, but it'll come right up either way, I believe.
And you can read all their stuff there.
We were talking about anti-Semitism in the anti-Israel protests, especially in Europe, and so I was telling the anecdote before the music break, the commercial break came and interrupted us about how I used to, you know, I wasn't pro-Israel necessarily, but I did not understand that, for example, one of the primary grievances of Osama bin Laden and his buddies and their recruitment schtick for the decade preceding 9-11 was American support not for Israel's very existence, although maybe it would have been if it had just been the very existence, but specifically it was their unending wars against the people of Lebanon and Palestine.
And of course that featured centrally in the motivation of Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker.
And so now you got my attention.
Why is it that America needs to make this sacrifice for Israel?
So that they can steal more of the rest of what's left of Palestine and the West Bank and the Gaza Strip?
To hell with them.
I got to have my towers knocked down for that.
And so I used to think, I'd hear people complaining on and on about Israel, and I would think, well, you know, maybe this guy's got a chip on his shoulder and Israel is a nice way of saying the Jews or something.
But no, I really realized that I have that same chip on my shoulder too.
Yeah.
But I think there is definitely a double standard in relation to how intense the hatred of Israel is in comparison with other states that carry out wars or do military things and so on.
And I'm just interested in where that double standard comes from.
I don't think it's necessarily anti-Semitic.
I think in some areas it is, but even where it isn't, I do think it is disproportionate.
And I'm always amazed that people, for example, protesters in Europe are saying nothing about Ukraine, for example, where forces supported by our governments are shelling one part of the country.
One thousand five hundred people have been killed, including old people and children.
But we don't see any protests at all, never mind protests saying, child murderer, smash the Kiev state.
Nothing like that.
But I'm just constantly struck by the fact that Israel seems to get people's blood pumping in a way that no other issue does.
And I think it's partly it's become a displacement issue from talking about the far more complicated nature of Western intervention today, which is a very difficult thing to understand and oppose.
And also, I think it's partly in some parts of Europe, there is an anti-Semitic element to it where Israel is singled out as the cause of all the world's problems in a similar way that the Jews used to be singled out as the cause of all the world's problems.
So I think it's it's become too much of an easy issue.
And I think anti-war people need to take a step back and ask themselves, is Israel really the cause of all the world's problems?
Yeah.
Oh, certainly not.
I mean, and I don't blame them for the American empire either.
If America wasn't an empire, there'd be nothing for them to lobby all damn day.
So, you know, I'm willing to put the responsibility everywhere that I possibly can.
In fact, that's how I find my enjoyment, Brendan, is assigning responsibility for massacres and and terror on as many people as I can think of to blame.
But at the same time, though, I mean, you really can't ignore the fact that the neoconservatives in the project for a new American century and the whole idea that we must seize this moment as our unipolar time to rule the whole world and make it our way and whatever has a lot to do with just making sure that America stays engaged over there no matter what, because that's perceived by the neoconservatives to be good for Israel.
Seems to me like less interventionist liberal internationalists and more paleo and libertarian type conservatives would have a lot more say in what the empire does if it wasn't for the neoconservative movement and their thirty five think tanks pretending to amount to some giant consensus.
Yeah, I think that it's true that, you know, for a long time, Israel played a very important role for America.
And that role was kind of as a policeman in the Middle East, you know, keeping things in check, ensuring that America had influence in that part of the world.
But even there, I think things are changing.
I think, for example, Obama has been more critical of Israel than other presidents have been.
Not as critical as some people would like, I know, but there is a break occurring.
And I think in Europe, it's much more pronounced in Europe, where you will be hard pressed to find a politician who's got a good word to say about Israel.
So I think what's happening slowly but surely is that the West is distancing itself ever so slightly from Israel because it finds it quite embarrassing.
And I think sometimes the anti-war movement, because it is so obsessed with Israel and it's obsessed with the fact that it still does get a large amount of military funding, it can't see the more the smaller nuanced changes that are taking place in the relationship between the West and Israel.
And I think it's not too fanciful to imagine that in a not too distant future, Israel could become a pariah state.
It could go from having being the West's friendliest state in the Middle East to being a pariah state.
And that's certainly what anti-war activists want.
They want Israel to be branded a rogue state or a pariah state.
I'm always very struck by the fact that they use that kind of imperialistic language.
Of course, rogue state is a term invented by Washington itself to demarcate civilized states from uncivilized states.
So I'm always very interested in the fact that the anti-war movement in relation to Israel uses that same language of Western imperialism.
So I think things are changing.
Things are shifting.
Israel's role is not what it used to be.
And I am worried about the focus on Israel above every other issue in the world.
All right.
Well, and so I'm curious now, what's your position on the actual recent conflict and or what should be done there?
Well, that's a really difficult question to answer in some ways.
I mean, I'm not in favor of the war in Gaza.
I think it's been very bloody.
It's been very destructive.
You know, I'd be the first to admit that.
But I think there is a danger in focusing on this war to the exclusion of all others.
And what we have now is a very partial anti-war movement, which is not really an anti-war movement at all in Europe, at least.
It's an anti-Israel movement.
And I think as a consequence of that, people are unaware of the fact that civilians are being slaughtered and shelled in eastern Ukraine.
They're unaware of the fact that in two days time, it's going to be the first year anniversary of the massacres in Egypt, during which nearly as many people were killed in three days as Israel has killed in four weeks.
And that was done by with Western arms and with Western support.
So there are lots of terrible things happening in the Middle East.
So there are lots of terrible things happening around the world, which people in Europe, at least, are not aware of.
So what I'm keen to do is to expand the focus.
And I'm going to say to these people, OK, if you really are anti-war or anti-imperialist or anti-intervention, then you need to prove that and you need to stop talking about other issues than just Israel.
Because at the moment, it looks to me just like a narrow anti-Israel movement, which is about stopping one particular war while allowing all the other war mongers in the world, including in Washington and London, to get off the hook.
Yeah, well, I think that's I think you got a real good point there.
And of course, you know, on this show, I try to be the exact opposite of that.
It's easy being a libertarian or in your case, the libertarian Marxist, where you never have any political representatives to swear loyalty to.
So you can it's easy to just go ahead and there's no incentive really against going ahead and being a equal opportunity attacker when it comes to these kinds of issues.
But so many people get caught up in partisanship, even on these great matters of life and death.
There's no doubt about it.
I'm sorry we don't have time to talk a wreck.
But thanks again for doing the show.
And we'll talk again soon, Brendan.
Thank you, Scott.
I sure appreciate it, man.
That's Brendan O'Neill, y'all.
He's at SpikedOnline.com, SpikedOnline.com.
We'll be right back.
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Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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U.S. military and financial support for Israel's permanent occupations of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is immoral, and it threatens national security by helping generate terrorist attacks against our country.
And face it, it's bad for Israel, too.
Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
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