Man has really seen it all in the past few months. Gen Zs and Gen Ys on Tiktok raving about their experiences reading Osama bin Laden's “Letter to America” and describing the document as “eye-opening.” Or develop enthusiasm for the Iraqi ex-dictator and mass murderer Saddam Hussein: Saddam was a friend of the Palestinians and fought against Zionism. And then there are the demonstrators who are cheering on the Houthis in Toronto, New York and Berlin: “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around.” All just marginal phenomena, so people try to calm themselves down. All blemplem, ballaballa, delulu, completely crazy, even a glitch, but still marginal phenomena. Even if they sometimes go surprisingly viral on social media, where the gate-keeping rules of traditional media are undermined. Because where else is interested in what a 25-year-old American lifestyle content creator thinks about the Middle East?
No, “Strike Germany” is not satire
But then you see all the cultural workers who have almost mutated into Janas from Kassel, who have declared war on “censorship” and say and post 24/7 what they believe has not been allowed to be said in Germany for a long time , namely criticism of Israel. You read an open letter, one statement after the other. And now “Strike Germany”, a kind of expanded BDS, i.e. a boycott of those who do not boycott Israel – in this case Germany and especially German cultural institutions. At first it was almost considered satire, just as many things had almost been considered satire. Or would have liked to think it was satire.
The statement by the author Lana Bastašić, for example, in which she separates from her German publisher because they do not share her opinion and are silent about the “ongoing genocide in Gaza and the systematic and systematic censorship in Germany in the last two months”. One also comes across the X-Feed of author and public intellectual Mithu Sanyal. People retweet as much as they can. It's a real surprise bag. Jürgen Todenhöfer is there, the Turkish Erdoğan propaganda channel TRT, the conspiracy platform “Nachdenkseiten”, the “Quds News Network”, which is attributed to Hamas, tweets in which “Zionists” are equated with “Nazis” and “ISIS” and the attacks by the Houthis as “nonviolent efforts to stop a genocide” can be described. The list could be continued endlessly, but then it would run the risk of doing exactly what is constantly complained about anyway: “sniffing around opinions,” “cancelling.” Signatures on open letters, retweets and statements should be understood as public expressions of opinion. Plus, in times when everything is constantly being shared and posted, nothing needs to be snooped on. And criticism is not the same as canceling.
It is also remarkable how much positioning is demanded everywhere and from everyone these days and how carelessly it is posted and shared at the same time: propaganda from various terrorist groups, Turkish or Qatari state broadcasters. No matter, the main thing is that it serves your own narrative. The Houthis, who have been heavily armed by Iran, are stylized as selfless, peace-loving freedom fighters with their slogan “God is great, death for America, death for Israel, cursed be the Jews, victory for Islam”, with their child soldiers and various war crimes only had the well-being of the Palestinians in mind and bravely stood up against the evil West.
Crude justifications
For a long time it was thought that a lack of media literacy was only a problem for boomers. Not at all! Whether consciously or unconsciously, you are becoming a henchman of terrorist groups and unjust states like Iran, even if you have shown very little interest in it in recent years. Iran is waging war, also with the help of its proxy militias, in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
Just last Tuesday, he fired ballistic missiles at the capital of the Autonomous Region of Kurdistan and apparently deliberately killed the Kurdish entrepreneur Peshraw Dizayee. His eleven-month-old daughter Jina, named after Jina Amini, who was murdered by the moral police in Tehran in 2022, also died with him. Iranian state media reported that a Mossad headquarters had been hit. It's not the first time. As early as 2020, Iran justified a drone attack on Erbil by saying that it had targeted the Israeli secret service and that Kurdistan was “a strategic center for the conspiracy and mischief of the Zionists”. These crude justifications are also making the rounds on social media again.
It is doubtful whether an answer can be found to this madness, this problem, this all-too-deadly gaga in the world situation these days. For now, an adequate analysis would be helpful.
#Totally #gaga #Cultural #workers #Middle #East
