Suspicion of Others is Bad Part 4 of ???

The limit of bad faith invocations of racism knows no bounds, as was evidenced by this truly preposterous bit of race-bating from the past week:

It should be obvious to anyone who has been paying any attention recently that the watermelon is a prominent symbol of Palestinian resistance, hence its inclusion in a poster promoting action on behalf of Palestine.  It should also be obvious that both currently and historically, there has been no better domestic advocate for Palestinian liberation than Black Americans (and vice versa).  While this faux outrage appears to be from the same playbook as always—that is, fanning the flames of racial hatred to divide marginalized groups with a common interest—I want to at least entertain a less paranoid reading.

Viewed through this lens, what does this critique become?  On a straightforward level, the accusation remains bizarre.  There is zero indication on the poster that the watermelon indicates an attack on Hakeem Jeffries.  There is no language attacking Jeffries, no indication that the symbol says anything about him, and zero indication of a connection between the symbol and him.  To infer such a statement from the poster requires the viewer to be centering Jeffries to an absurd degree.  The subject of the poster, the very people that require support, are the Palestinians!  Making the subject Jeffries, a man who is likely to be Speaker of the House a little over a year from now is, in and of itself, perverse!

With respect to the specific accusation of racism, the argument becomes both stranger and sadder.  Stranger in that Jeffries himself has invoked the rhetoric of one of the most racist politicians in recent American history to justify the continuation of a brutal settler regime.  It's dishonest (at best) to cry racism at the political communication of those less powerful than you when you use the pulpit afforded to you by your station to whitewash the discrimination of your own people.  And sadder because one who sees a picture of a somewhat delicious fruit and immediately translates that into suspicion of others has such a miserable and dismal way of viewing your fellow man!  Your self-loathing is such that you view a cry for solidarity as an attack!  Worse yet, it causes you to collapse all potential meaning, all possible interpretations of the world into merely your own personal paranoid fantasy.  One person promulgating this smear was at least helpful enough to spell this out:

Claiming that only you have insight into "the real meaning" and that everyone else is being a secret racist is wildly self-centered at the very best.  It's a claim that your own understanding of *everything* is so self-evidently true that misunderstandings are not even possible.  

Why is this important?  Like most other appeals to suspicion, this plays directly into the hands of the powerful.  Don't just take it from me; the powerful are happy to say this exact thing themselves:

The lesson here, as with every other instance in this series, is to question who your suspicion of others really serves?  Are your accusations meaningful and real enough to be worth forgoing opportunities for solidarity?  And do you really think the fucking watermelon is a coded racist message?

Three Brief Thoughts on The Media

1. A few weeks ago, there was a kerfuffle regarding Nazi apologia that I remarked on here.  In that post I wrote "If whitewashing Nazis and minimizing the Holocaust is directly supported by US hegemonic interests, what does that suggest about what else those institutions are willing to excuse, or even worse, do?"  This was unfortunately and immediately prophetic, as our government is now sponsoring a genocide in Palestine.  What is even worse is that similar Nazi apologia is being used to justify it.   From the linked article:

"As I said after watching at the Israeli embassy the other day the unedited footage of the massacre, this is one occasion when saying that some people are worse than the Nazis is not hyperbole.

Average members of the SS and other killing units of Hitler’s were rarely proud of their average days’ work. Very few felt that shooting Jews in the back of the head all day and kicking their bodies into pits was where their own lives had meant to end up.

Many spent their evenings getting blind drunk to try to forget. Nazi commanders had to worry about staff “morale”.  When the war ended, the Nazis tried to pretend that Treblinka and other death camps never existed."

It should go without saying that excusing or minimizing Nazi crimes is at best a soft form of Holocaust denial.  And it's absolutely beyond the pale to say that the people being actively oppressed and killed by the Israeli state are somehow worse than the Nazis.  It's hard to pin down this perverse trend to a singular cause, but I will say that the context collapse and appeals to ignorance that most modern media relies on is what enables such evil to repeatedly go to print. 

EDIT: Found a good thread on this phenomenon that gets at root cause better than I can:

EDIT 2: There was another piece of Nazi apologia that made the rounds the other day, which takes a similar tact to the previous discourse.  To whatever degree the contrast presented in the article (gleeful Palestinians vs remorseful Nazis) is true, it of course useless because it omits the context in which these acts were committed.  Indeed, a people struggling to be free from their tormenters might experience a sense of relief when they succeed in their aims while an oppressive force like the Nazis understands, at least on some level, that they're the bad guys.  And more importantly, this whole argument only exists to shift righteous anger at fascists to the very people they are oppressing:

2.  Yesterday, a website not at all suspiciously named HonestReporting reported that Gazan journalists knew in advance of the October 7 attacks, and went so far as to say they even participated in them.  Knowledgeable people immediately smelled something fishy, and today, official sources confirmed this was bullshit.  And yet the damage was done, as the more "moderate" members of the Israeli government used this as pretense to continue murdering journalists at will:

This continues a pattern in this conflict where the initial lie (beheaded babies, Hamas bombing their own hospital) gets amplified only to be immediately walked back.  This two-step not only confuses even the most ardent observers but serves to numb us to the very real atrocities being committed on our behalf.  This means that perhaps the most important thing we can do as advocates for Palestine is to immediately and forcefully call out Israeli lies for what they are.

3. Long-running feminist website Jezebel was shuttered this week, and it was revealed today that the ostensible reason was cowardice on the part of advertisers.  Specifically, marketing teams are remiss to display ads alongside "controversial" topics like abortion, which Jezebel exceled at writing about.  This naked example of our corporate overlords disciplining advocacy through "pragmatic" business practices made me think of how you don't really hear of overt meddling in media these days.  When the normal way of doing business is set up to automatically defer to the most conservative impulses of the almighty dollar, I guess you don't really even need a CIA anymore.