Israel — America nexus and a Twitter presidency

What better moment, then, for Dorsey to do something wonderful for the American people — to say nothing of the rest of the world — by pulling the plug on Trump’s unfiltered 140-character propaganda machine?

by Anwar A. Khan-Jun 1, 2018

( June 1, 2018, Dhaka, Sri Lanka Guardian) The British government’s subservience to Jewish and Israeli interests is nearly as enthusiastic as in the United States, though it is driven by the same sorts of things – Jewish money and Jewish power, particularly in the media … Characteristically, no one in the U.S. mainstream media, which is generally supportive of these complaints, is noting that the Polish legislation is not too dissimilar to any number of existing anti-free speech laws criminalizing Holocaust denial in Europe or criticism of Israel in the United States. Nor is it different than some laws in Israel, including the criminalization of anyone who speaks or writes in support of Israel. As usual, there is one standard for Jewish issues and Israelis and a quite different standard for everyone else.

American power is the power to suppress criticism of the US power. And … If you look over Israel’s history, you find that the massacre has been a ready tool in the Israeli war-chest; and Israelis have not been prosecuted for carrying them out. Indeed, a couple of those responsible later became prime ministers! Here, largely from my own memory, is a rapidly-assembled list of massacres, defined by Webster’s as the killing of a “number of usually helpless or unresisting human beings under circumstances of atrocity or cruelty” (and yes, a couple precedes the birth of the state).

America’s enabling of the brutal reality that is today’s Israel makes it fully complicit in the war crimes carried out against the helpless and hapless Palestinian people. So where is the outrage in the American media about the massacre of civilians? Characteristically, Israel portrays itself as somehow a victim and the U.S. media, when it bothers to report about dead Palestinians at all, picks up on that line. The Jewish State is portrayed as always endangered and struggling to survive … There is no net gain for the United States in continuing the lopsided and essentially immoral relationship with the self-styled Jewish State. There is no enhancement of American national security, quite the contrary, and there remains only the sad realization that the blood of many innocent people is, to a considerable extent, on the hands of America and Israel.

America is waging several wars with dubious legal sanction in domestic or international law. The U.S. military stands astride the Greater Mideast region on behalf of an increasingly rogue-like regime in Washington, D.C. Worse still, this isn’t a Donald Trump problem, per se. No, three successive administrations – Democratic and Republican – have widened the scope of a global war on a tactic (terror), on the basis of two at best vague, and at worst extralegal, congressional authorisations for the use of force. Indeed, the US is veritably addicted to waging undeclared, unwinnable wars with unconvincing legal sanction … The USA flouts international law when it suits American interests and stretches domestic authorisations to their breaking point in the name of perpetual, doomed warfare. To sum up, the world is witnessing the most dangerous man in the American White House. Donald Trump is trying to create bedlam, destructions and deaths in many where in the world, but people all over the world should raise their voices in the harshest language in unison to stop him from doing destructions, murders and so on.

Here is an unsolicited idea for Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, that with a little luck he will take to heart, assuming he wants to make his company relevant again: Kick President Donald J. Trump off Twitter. It is not that Trump appears to have violated any of Twitter’s terms of service, he probably hasn’t. It is not that he doesn’t deserve the same First Amendment protections to express himself as the rest of us, he does.

No, the problem with Trump and Twitter is painfully obvious: He is reckless, cavalier, condescending, obnoxious, irresponsible and insulting, among other things. With almost any other Twitter user, such behaviour could easily be ignored, and would be, making the tweeter in question quickly irrelevant. People are used to American presidents getting plenty of media attention on a daily basis, of course. That is a given and has been for decades. And that is as it should be. What the US elected leaders say and do is important and newsworthy and deserves plenty of coverage. But Trump’s often inane tweets, coming deliberately as they do in the early morning hours, have had the unfortunate tendency of warping and dominating nearly every single news cycle, day after day.

It cannot be the right answer, for instance, that just because Trump tweets about how Arnold Schwarzenegger’s debut on “Celebrity Apprentice” did not get the viewership that Trump did when he starred in the show, people are led down the rabbit hole for the rest of the day. Trump knows that his tweets, as inchoate as they often are, must be covered because he is the president of the United States. He takes full advantage of that fact.

Senator Chuck Schumer, the new minority leader in the Senate, said recently, “With all due respect, America cannot afford a Twitter presidency.” Schumer is not alone. Both Michael Dukakis, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee, and John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, have recommended that Trump “get off that Twitter thing,” as Dukakis put it. According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, 64 percent of Americans think Trump should leave Twitter. Often, Trump instills fear and loathing in the objects of his tweets. Lately, the auto industry has borne much of the brunt of Trump’s tweeting barrage.

The industry has snapped to attention, and given Trump a number of public relations victories. Not since President John F. Kennedy attacked United States Steel — for raising steel prices by UU$6 a ton — has a United States president so directly provoked individual companies by name. Trump has also gone after Carrier, Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. But bullying individual corporate executives into kowtowing to his whims because he is president of the United States is not what made America great and won’t be what makes it great again.

To try to get another perspective on whether Dorsey should toss Trump off Twitter. He is the co-founder of People for Internet Responsibility. For Weinstein the fundamental question is whether Trump is being treated differently from other Twitter users. My view is that he has been and still is being treated differently, permitted to continue tweeting where any ordinary user would have been either temporarily or permanently banned long ago. Trump’s tweeting does, in fact, violate several aspects of Twitter’s terms of service, including his continuing direct attacks on individuals and the way those tweets inspire massive secondary attacks from his followers and others. Trump tweets about individual corporations which are hurting their stock prices, in the short run, and might lead to long term stock manipulation or blackmail. I think any ordinary user would have been kicked off long ago.

Twitter is hurting right now. In the last few months, it tried, and failed, to sell itself. Its stock is back to trading close to its all-time low and is now around 35 percent below where its shares made their market debut in 2013. Its number of worldwide users has been stagnating around 315 million. UBS, the Swiss bank, downgraded the stock last week. Executives are jumping ship. Dorsey, who is also the chief executive of Square (a payments service), was one of the few leading internet entrepreneurs whom Trump did not invite to his technology meeting in Trump Tower very recently.

What better moment, then, for Dorsey to do something wonderful for the American people — to say nothing of the rest of the world — by pulling the plug on Trump’s unfiltered 140-character propaganda machine? Schumer is absolutely right, we cannot afford a Twitter presidency and unless Dorsey does something about it, that is exactly what Americans are going to get.