“I think it’s about time that we stop apologizing for our support for Israel,” then Senator Joe Biden declared in 1986, as if anyone ever has.
“There’s no apology to be made – none. It’s the best $3 billion investment we make. Were it not for Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.”
Although American support for its Middle Eastern ally is frequently framed under the rubric of liberal antiracism, Biden’s candid pronouncement spoke to the geopolitical realpolitik that informed US alliance with Saudi Arabia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and apartheid South Africa. The United States’ backing of Israel has formed a core part of its modern foreign policy, invigorating Western imperialism with the potent justification of fighting terrorism just as the communist threat had been seemingly vanquished.
But support for Israel has reaped domestic dividends as well, increasingly providing Washington with a new excuse to censor content online. Analyst Steve Poikonen joined the final edition of Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Tuesday to discuss the phenomenon, noting that growing awareness of the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza has required new efforts on the part of elites to maintain ideological hegemony on the matter.
“Over the last year plus of this livestreamed genocide and the expansion of the greater Israel project, people have become far more acquainted with what Zionism as a political force really stands for and what it means to be a Zionist and what you get to look at and what you get to ignore,” said the commentator, who hosts the online programs AMWakeUp and Slow News Day.
“So it has become incumbent on narrative management to get a hold of the conversation because it was starting to slip away from them. And how couldn’t it? We're waking up every day and walking into social media and seeing video after video of residential neighborhoods being bombed, churches being bombed, hospitals being bombed, people being burned alive while still attached to IV equipment.”
“That's going to have some negative ramifications for you if you're the people committing these atrocities,” he noted. “So what better way to get a hold of it than to eliminate the speech that connects you to those atrocities? And that's exactly what Meta and Facebook have done.”
Writer Caitlin Johnstone has documented the arbitrary efforts of Meta and other platforms to censor pro-Palestine material by enforcing vague guidelines and opaque content moderation. “Hezbollah, Hamas and the Houthis are not my enemies. My enemies are the Western imperialists and their Israeli partners in crime who are inflicting a waking nightmare upon the Middle East and working to start a massive new war of unfathomable horror,” Johnstone once wrote in a post shared on Facebook and Instagram.
Meta removed the post – claiming it went against the company’s rules against “praising” dangerous organizations – and threatened Johnstone with the banning of her account. Johnstone’s tone could be more accurately described as one of neutrality, but anything other than unequivocal condemnation is apparently out of bounds as Western foreign policy relies so heavily on vilification of Arab and Palestinian resistance.
“This is indistinct from government censorship,” Johnstone observed, noting that the classification of these groups as “terrorist” organizations is a distinction drawn by Western governments. International law guarantees Palestinians and all occupied people the right to oppose their oppression by all necessary means, including armed struggle.
Growing US government involvement in questions of online content moderation has continued apace, most recently culminating in the establishment of sanctions on Russian media that have eliminated the positions of this author and other US-based employees of Sputnik. President Biden’s hostility toward alternative media signals the Western ruling class’s growing fear – of its mounting failures, of competing narratives, and of its own people.
“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself,” observed US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in 1966. It is a lack of confidence increasingly shared by the rest of the world as American imperialism gasps its last dying breaths and a truly democratic, multipolar world is born.