Manufactured Megastars, Insipid Icons and Corporate Cronies

Re-examining your Criteria for Admiration Against the “Backdrop” of the Gaza Genocide

Shallow Emotions and Popular Culture

Mainstream Western media and culture is excellent at paying mere lip service to aspirational qualities. The affluence and mindless privilege of certain societies has created a performative bubble devoid of real, solid qualities and attributes.

Take reality TV, a phenomenon of the West that now dominates all TV channels; where hugely successful shows like X Factor magnify people’s personal stories to generate excessive sentiment; judges gush in saccharine and choreographed tears that barely make a track through their carefully applied makeup.

Privileged wealthy “housewives” quarrel over petty and trivial matters, and shows like Dancing on Ice, the height of banality – has its own “politics”, that people follow religiously; audience votes substitute for actual measured appraisal of people’s qualities and humanity.

Authenticity has always been sacrificed at the altar of popularity, but in today’s climate this has been taken to an extreme; the irony is that people think they are more authentic than ever because society is less overtly conventional – but in reality, uniqueness is dead and true charisma has had its day, in a sea of manufactured “stars”.

Shows of Grandiosity, Fake Feminism and the Gaze of power

News items dedicated to “feminism” have women quoting banal platitudes before being blasted into space a la Katy Perry; the elevation of white, Western female privilege in its showy manifestation eclipses the real plight of women within different and “othered” cultural spheres, a plight that is often the outcome of the wars and plundering greed of Western capitalism.

Feminists have been noticeably quiet over “Israel’s” multiple gross, criminal violations of women’s rights in Gaza; the female icons taken by young women as embodying “strong woman” values – female performers like Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce – have revealed themselves shamefully in thrall to the Zionist pressure that is a feature of most Western big money institutions. This type of ostentatious “strong woman” persona is useless for most women globally - if not counterproductive.

Indeed, ignoring individual female freedom and the right to voice your own truth, in favour of being a product that is subject to male approval and regulation, or even “vetting” in order to be a part of the institutions of privilege - pandering to the “male gaze” and playing the desired role - has traditionally been conditional to entering showbiz, a prominent example being the famous Hollywood “casting couch.”

The ”male gaze” though, is the lens of power, and all that power represents; today, that power is represented by capitalism, corporatism and Zionism. It is therefore, perhaps no surprise, that the female “celebrities” who succumb to a system of regulating their own voice in order to be a cultural symbol of success, also frequently keep quiet over the major human rights violations of women in Palestine and other Muslim countries, that are obliquely supported by the Western mainstream ideological machine.

It is a fact that mainstream entertainment - with its reality TV style promotion of the “individual drama” - the commonplace elevated to “celebrity” status, that promotes a “politics” of banality – is a distraction and detraction from what is real and important.

The predominant TV diet of many people, trivializes human emotion and interactions, showcasing what is unimportant, and hiding what is critical and current, beneath a veneer of chat show banality.

For example, awards such as the BBC Hero awards, while having some validity, use the term “hero” too lightly, while ignoring the unsung heroes who live a reality of unseen acts of true heroism each and every day.

Those are the terrorists on the right - incase you were confused

Western Media’s Portrayal of Middle Eastern Men – Complicity with Genocide

Western media has played a huge role in not just legitimizing a genocide through its deeply biased coverage of events in the Middle East - but in actively demonizing both women and men in Palestine and the Middle East, by discussing them in rhetoric that makes them synonymous with terrorism, even whilst “Israeli’s” - the so called “allies of the West” and symbols of civilization - rape Palestinian men in their torture camps and kidnap Palestinian doctors for standing by their patients.

The Palestinian men demonized in Western media coverage are men who have: dug through rubble with their bare hands for hours, looking for survivors; gathered up children – including their own – who have been blasted with bombs and drones, and rushed them to hospital or cried over their lifeless bodies; driven ambulances day and night under gunfire, under starvation; they are men who have risked their lives so that they may bring a sack of flour to their starving families.

Men like Anas Al-Sharif who had the choice to leave Gaza and live a perfectly comfortable life in Qatar and refused to do so, because he would rather risk death in order to serve his people and show the indifferent world the truth about what is happening. And still the West is complicit with the terrorist occupier rogue state of “Israel” in smearing him with Hamas allegations (just like they have smeared Hamas, while lauding other historical resistance movements).

We can also include the men of Yemen, who embody true courage, steadfastness and nobility; risking their own lives to attack commercial shipping lanes – not civilians – out of loyalty to the Palestinians.

This type of true loyalty is a purity that usually exists only within communities that have seen true suffering and devastation, where the stakes are high and where position and status are not glorified, and so values run deep rather than the superficial attitudes codified in the productions of mainstream Western media.

It is easy to be a feminist when the stakes are low and the proof is your image; it is easy to be a “hero” when your loyalty or grit will never be truly put to the test. The calibre of people within the public sphere today is shockingly low for this reason, whether politicians or public figures. If being a hero means winning an ice-skating competition or a bake off, then we have no hope.

Again, I quote: “When small men cast big shadows it means the sun is about to set”.

The Western Corporate World’s Empty Slogans and Allegiance to Zionism

The corporate world today is one where Zionism has a strong foothold. My own conversations over the past almost two years with people from the corporate world, who peddle some form of the Zionist narrative whilst knowing barely anything about the history of the Middle East, are revealing.

Despite ostensibly promoting values of innovation, courage, integrity, respect, empowerment, passion, honesty, teamwork and so on, Western corporate people in senior and leadership positions continue to bleat about the Holocaust, elevate the Zionist narratives of Palestinians “firing” rockets into “Israel” and castigate the Palestinians – without ever having spoken to any Palestinian people in their lives.

The close alliance of many within the corporate sphere and workplace with “Israeli” and pro-Zionist people makes them “honour” their ties with those who promote “Israel’s” actions as “self-defence” and to proffer the flimsiest exonerations of “Israel”.

I have spoken to people from the corporate world who maintain that “Israel needs to feel safe”, that Palestinians have rejected peace many times and have even blathered some pre-Lapsarian style myth of how generations of Arabs and Jews lived in harmony before October 7^th.

Yes, there have been indigenous Arabs and Jews in the land of Palestine for some generations; but such people conveniently omit the facts of the apartheid system in Occupied Palestine, within which Jews and Arabs have a tiered system of rights. “Israel” has been declared an apartheid state by every major human rights organization. They also conveniently ignore the extensive debunking of October 7^th lurid stories of “beheaded babies”, systematic sexual assaults and babies in ovens.

No amount of “Israeli” atrocities will make them turn against their Zionist paymasters and truly condemn “Israel” – instead they will forever take the convenient line that “Israel” has gone a bit too far and that Netanyahu has responded disproportionately; they never go back and ask what October 7^th was a response to, and why Hamas formed in the first place.

So the truth emerges that many of the people lauded as successful within the capitalism framework of the corporate world, spout empty rhetoric about human values; the same human values that are completely inverted in their expression in Zionists, and expressed in their purest form by Palestinians.

You want courage? Try taking your children to school through checkpoints every morning; whilst the inversion of courage, for example, is dressing up in the lingerie of women you have just killed.

Teamwork? The men who co-ordinate with their colleagues to reach hospitals through zones that are being bombed.

Grit, stamina, perseverance? It’s my friends in Gaza who are studying for exams whilst bombs are raining down on them. It is not privileged “Israeli” teenagers swanning into the “IDF” complete with military gear and weapons, posing with their guns on twitter, trigger happy and smirking as they slaughter civilians by pressing a button, or machine gun children for “fun”.

If a Gazan turned up for a corporate interview without revealing that they are Palestinian, they would get the job every time; and it is also probably true that someone with the values and work ethic, mindset and “character” of your typical “Israeli” youth, would be discarded immediately.

The qualities that Western corporations elevate as being indicative of success are at odds with the professed allegiance of many of these people whom I speak to. They want to join in the myth that all Palestinians are Hamas and that “Israeli’s” are a besieged, victimized people who have lashed out after the bestial people of Palestine attacked them.

I even listened to a banal diatribe recently from a corporate person about how they had instilled values of “being your own person” in their offspring - whilst making it sadly apparent that their ironically parroted adherence to the Zionist script was underpinned by absolute ignorance of the everyday reality of what Gazans are actually like. So much for being your own person.

The fact is that the values ostensibly promoted within the mainstream institutions of the West, are not in line with the wider reality of what is actually prioritized. There are serious schisms in a society where people slavishly worship celebrities and pay lip service to the heroic qualities that they ignore and dismiss when these are enacted to their fullest extent in a people that they have been told to hate.

I come back to Western privilege, It is this type of privilege that is a sign of the demise of society, a privilege based on greed, occupation, exploitation and a dishonesty of values that runs deep to the core.

Today, it is Zionists who are the most extreme manifestation of this type of privilege; the mindless privilege that embodies the worst and most despicable qualities of selfishness, exploitation and superficial shallowness. A superiority and privilege that makes them happy to watch people suffer a genocide enacted by their own people, on the other side of a fence they erected - all whilst blaming those being genocided.

Free Palestine from the River to the Sea; Military Intervention to Palestine Now!