Lindsey Graham's Disgusting Tweet About Greta Thunberg Is 'Brain Rot' in Its Truest, Most Vulgar Sense
As the Zeteo contributor set sail on the Gaza aid flotilla, GOP Senator Lindsey Graham tweeted: "Hope Greta and her friends can swim!"
This week, Zeteo contributor Greta Thunberg set sail with brave individuals from around the world in an attempt to break the US-Israeli siege of Gaza and bring aid and hope to starving Palestinians. They’re doing this just weeks after a similar flotilla was attacked – allegedly by Israel – and 15 years after Israeli forces attacked the inaugural flotilla, killing nine people.
Pretty stunning display of bravery, no less when you consider something even more mind-blowing… Senator Lindsey Graham’s response:
Yes – a senior Republican senator is apparently jokingly (or not) calling for the demise of people trying to feed a starving population.
Earlier on Sunday, Graham praised Ukraine’s drone attack on Russian military assets, noting that “Russia indiscriminately kills men, women, and children,” and so it was “time for the world to act decisively against Russia’s aggression.”
Then an hour later, the prominent Republican stumbled over himself to seemingly joke about a nation that’s indiscriminately killing men, women, and children attacking volunteers acting decisively against its aggression.
The warped logic, wildly insulting to the intelligence or basic morals of the Americans he serves, is one thing. As with their comical hypocrisy, the refrain about the modern Republican Party that “the cruelty is the point” is baked into US politics. But the extent to which these threads undergirding American conservatism are put into total overdrive when it comes to Israel is jarring to any observer.
Because, to be clear: Graham, a US senator, paid by our taxes, is apparently calling for a government that’s killed at least 54,000 (and likely, far more) Palestinians to bomb a boat carrying food to a starving population (or, if I’m being incredibly generous, he is just hoping the ship sinks). It’d be one thing if Graham was operating in the already-broken framework of the draconianism we’re used to: egging on the detaining of protesters and cheering for the bombing of Gaza under the auspices of “eliminating Hamas.”
Think how far we’ve come: pointing out Israel’s bombing of humanitarians was a “blood libel.” Now, it’s a punchline.
Here, we reach the endpoint of it all: a Republican, sealed off in his grotesque, hermetically-sealed bubble, finding it not only appropriate, but actively helpful in his (and his Israeli friends’) PR crusade to buoyantly rejoice at the idea of 12 volunteers – including a young college-aged person – being bombed, and left to tread in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.
That psyche comes from somewhere. That poisonous bubble Graham is in isn’t algorithmic, like a bubble you or I could fall into – it’s constructed over years of being lobbied, wined, dined, brought in line, and hammered to know who is human and who is not. It’s a “moral” framework so bereft of any actual engagement with morality that it’s straight-up alien to you or me. Regardless of your stance on Israel or Palestine, Graham’s giddiness at the idea of a “helper” suffering is just reptilian. It’s a “brain rot” in its truest, most vulgar sense.
And a big part of this bubble are people like Arsen Ostrovsky:
Now, unfortunately, seeing a blue check-clad user calling for Israel to attack “the little jihadi @GretaThunberg” is not an aberration of Elon’s Twitter. But it’s a little more eyebrow-raising when you consider who this person is.
Arsen Ostrovsky is an “international human rights lawyer,” “proud Zionist,” and CEO of the International Legal Forum – an organization that’s received money from the Israeli government (which takes money from US taxpayers) in its pursuit to target critics of the Israeli government. Such a man – an icon of the types of interests that flood the halls of Congress on the daily, fueling that grotesque bubble Graham is submerged in – was even hailed by the Biden administration as a proponent of its work to counter antisemitism.
Which is to say, Graham and Ostrovsky’s tweets represent the outgrowth of a seemingly unsustainable feature of modern American politics.
Politicians themselves are surrounded by an entire ecosystem that has largely only maintained its Zionism, if not doubled down, contrary to the trajectory of the rest of the nation.
People from conservative maverick Rep. Thomas Massie and the beloved Ms. Rachel, to United Nations officials and even previously-reluctant genocide scholars, and many in between have criticized the Israeli government, condemned it for its war crimes and genocidal acts, and spoken out in ways diametrically opposed to the insular, mutant, and ever-shrinking bubble that Graham and Ostrovsky are part of. Millions have expressed their discontent, and continue to do so despite the repression. As they do, politicians only double down on the project – thus spurring more people to find the project disconcerting, and so on.
So how does this monstrous cycle – of rhetoric; radical violence; and subsequently more radical rhetoric and more radical violence – end?
Think of it this way. Israel has already attacked one aid flotilla, and it is suspected of attacking another just weeks ago. What’s stopping them from doing it again?
What if Graham and Ostrovsky get their wish?
And to what end do we allow that possibility to grow likelier and likelier?
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Check out Greta’s message from the flotilla….
And read more about the history of Gaza aid flotillas:
What a truly disgusting little man he is. Absolutely pathetic that someone like that would ever be elected to any office.
This kind of species is detrimental to human life and is not worth the oxygen they breathe.