As my dwindling band of regular readers may be aware, I had intended to write a series of Substack articles pertaining to my relationship with David Icke, but it's not gone well. A month after I'd published the first in the series, examining accusations of antisemitism, the second installment foundered. As a stop-gap, I wrote a two thousand word newsy rant while wearing a Homburg hat and smoking a blunt, like Woodrow Wyatt, the News of the World’s ‘Voice of Reason’!
The intention of my Substack, so far as my Work Coach is concerned, is to monetise it so that eventually it pays me enough for Universal Credit not to have to make up the balance. Step one is to build an audience and, to do that, conventional wisdom dictates that one must post regularly. I've been posting artfully wrought and carefully-referenced articles of 4,000+ words, which take a lot of effort. The context in which they are written is the ongoing Ascension Process, with which I am intimately involved. It takes a lot out of a body.
Therefore, I thought I might fill in the gaps with two thousand words 'thinks' pieces that could be written spontaneously at the end of the week if I'd got nothing more considered to post on a Sunday morning. Calling it, News of the World, was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the old red-top Sunday scandal sheet, the Wapping Liar.
One wonders what they would have made of Kneecap?
Last week, I told how Kneecap - Irish Republican rappers from Belfast who rhyme in Gaelic - had performed in Brockwell Park after one of them had been charged with supporting a terrorist organisation. He picked up and paraded what proved to be a Hezbollah banner that was thrown onto the stage at a gig in London last August.
Kneecap had come under censure following their performance at the Californian Coachella festival in late April, during which messages were displayed about the genocide in Gaza that started the day after 07/10/23 and is still going on, remorselessly, day after day, to the shame and disgust of practically the whole world.
But Kneecap chanted, 'Free, free Palestine!'
I didn't add links to last weeks NotW, or I would have referenced Lowkey's exposé for Double Down News of the various pro-Israel groups, several of which are UK charities, conspiring to destroy Kneecap. Lowkey is not merely a fearless investigative reporter and political activist, but also one of our most literate homegrown UK rappers. His debut album in 2009, Soundtrack to the Struggle, contained the track, Long Live Palestine, mourning the failure of the Second Intifada but advocating resistance as the answer with the defiant chant, "Free, free Palestine".
A decade later, when Palestine was still not free and as the slow extinction of the Palestinian people and culture continued, Lowkey re-recorded Long Live Palestine on his second Soundtrack to the Struggle. This version - part 3 - was prefaced by Frankie Boyle clad in a keffiyeh reading a Palestinian poem and featured another keffiyeh-clad ginger, Maverick Sabre. Over the outro, the voice of Ken Loach explained how people were waking up to the injustices that continued to be perpetrated in Palestine. Not enough people, obviously. Now, the situation has got a lot more attention and another generation is learning the true facts of the matter.
Lowkey returned to the subject of Free Palestine two months after the inciting incident of 07/10/23 to mark 'a cataclysmic event in human history'. He took a line from Long Live Palestine as its title: "This is not a war, it is systematic genocide. But whatever they try, Palestine will never die." Now that the slow genocide had sped up, Lowkey released a new track to show solidarity with the Palestinians and draw attention to the atrocities. The video for Palestine Will Never Die, directed and produced by Bold Stories for Double Down News, employs news footage from Gaza so gristly that it is frequently interrupted on YouTube with the word, 'censored'.
YouTube considers the images contained in Lowkey's video too shocking to show, but that is the point. It is supposed to be disturbing. These haunting images of atrocity that have been coming out of Gaza from the first live-streamed genocide in history shame humanity. It brings shame upon the human race. How can we live with ourselves while allowing this shit to happen?
The video opens with a drone shot over a devastated cityscape that already looked like Dresden after it had been firebombed and that was sixteen months ago. The onslaught has carried on almost every day since. We were sick of it then and are utterly disgusted by it now. I say, 'we', speaking for all who are ashamed of us. The atrocity we are living through may be the greatest crime against humanity ever committed, not in terms of numbers, but because nobody in the whole world wide web can plausibly deny it. Unless they are the enemy of humanity.
In a way, the genocide has simplified things for me. There are certain commentators from the political right whom I used to respect. I did not necessarily agree with these Voices of Reason, but would hear them out because I thought they had a valid perspective and made intelligent arguments. But genocide is where I draw the line. Anyone who tries to justify what is happening - was predicted to happen from the moment of the provocative action, which is still routinely evoked by Israhell's apologetic client media - is beneath contempt. I have no time for them.
I must say, it has uncluttered my life! Also, the daily agony of witnessing the devastation is alleviated slightly by my schadenfreude at the mental implosion of certain Zionist media shills as they struggle to support the indefensible. Verily, we are witnessing the endgame of this epoch and it takes a conspiracy theorist like David Icke to make sense of it. (That is, to order the chaos, if you're with me!)
Long Live Palestine features a popular activists' refrain sung by Mai Khalil (who joined Lowkey live on 21/06/24 in a one-off concert at St. Pancreas Church in aid of peace, freedom and justice for Palestine): "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free". Zionists insist this slogan is a statement of genocidal intent that implies the expulsion of Jews from Israel.
With the Zionist entity, every accusation is a confession and, in the spirit of Satan, everything is inverted. Now that he's being mildly censured for starving the Palestinians, Netanyahu says, "'Free Palestine' is just today's version of 'Heil Hitler'." His pretext was a brutal double murder in Washington DC. The suspected perpetrator had yelled, 'Free Palestine', as he was led away. In Netanyahu's demented worldview, Hamas are Nazis and, 'Free Palestine' means, 'Kill Jews'. Every mirror Bibi looks into shows him the face of a psychopath.
Benjamin Netanyahu is criminally insane, a genocidal maniac, hell bent upon the ultimate crime against humanity. Surely, nobody one knows would be so twisted as to spout similar rhetoric? Well, I am still somewhat stunned to report, I do know someone of that ilk. A Facebook 'friend' from many years ago, with whom I do not believe I have ever interacted online before, commented on my post about Kneecap:
We've been there before in 1933-1945. We know how it starts and how it looks, we know that millions of people can blindly follow a fascist movement only because it's cool... Hate is hate... and it's easy to fall into this trap. Never again we will stand silently and witness millions of people murdered in the name of hate. All the 'noble' people that have no clue whatsoever on the matter that they feel so strongly about. Hating Jews was and to my distress and sadness still is a very popular activity.'
Can you guess this person is Israeli? I knew them over a dozen years ago, when I was a fairly diligent student of Vipassana Meditation as taught by S.N.Goenka, who said that one could monitor the progress of one's spiritual practice by the development of awareness and equanimity. 'Vipassana' means, 'to see things as they really are'. So far as this experienced practitioner is concerned, Kneecap's stance against genocide is really about hating Jews.
After 18 months of livestreamed slaughter, this ghastly ghoul's distress and sadness is reserved for those committing the killing.
I replied, with all the dignity I could muster, 'You have no moral authority to lecture on hate'. But you can’t argue with a sick mind:
'Hi Russell, I'm not lecturing on hate, I'm protecting myself and other Jews against a death cult called 'Free Palestine' whose propaganda machine is as good as the Nazis. Two Jews (not Israelis) were murdered in Washington DC, in the name of that cult.'
Likesay, every accusation is a confession. I understand this diabolically deluded person to be the product of a sick society, the most heavily-indoctrinated on earth. It is no excuse, especially not from someone who practices a form of meditation its teacher claims to have been the technique by which the one we call the Buddha achieved His enlightenment. This angry Israeli had an explosive temper when I worked with them, way back then, but they were diligent in their meditation and would routinely apologise upon due reflection following an outburst. Sadly, all those years of hardcore meditation do not ultimately seem to have done them much good.
Vipassana meditation as taught by Goenka stopped working for me a decade ago. After seven years of fairly assiduous practice, I noticed that my fellow travellers - like this Israeli person - weren't getting any kinder. They were excellent at siting still for hours on end, but it seemed to me that the folks I'd sat with over years were growing increasingly stern and authoritarian. That is not my style at all. Plus a close friend who had died visited me ethereally at the end of my final Vipassana retreat to let me know my time in that school was over.
Goenka tells a story that resonated with me about a friend of his, whom Goenka had persuaded to take a course at the IMC in Rangoon taught by Sayagyi U Ba Khin, for whom he would translate the Hindi speakers. This fellow was so freaking angry, he spent practically the whole ten days sweating profusely while fulminating. He was so busy being angry that he nearly missed his connection. I relate to this tale because I too sweated buckets of rage throughout my first ten day Vipassana course. And felt all the better for it.
I think angry people - as I was - are drawn to Vipassana as taught by Goenka. And Vipassana is pretty big in Israel, which country I imagine to be full of angry people like this one, who I've discreetly not identified, and other Israelis I've encountered, at the Kabbalah Center in London and on the beaches of Goa, where ex-IDF reservists go to decompress after doing their National Service. Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian and pop intellectual approved by the World Economic Forum, is among the most senior echelon of Vipassana meditators, who sit in silence for sixty days at a stretch.
Since YNH is so advanced in his practice, I was puzzled by his apparent lack of pāna, the wisdom that arises. His long hours of intense meditation using the technique Goenka teaches brought Yuval to an understanding that old fashioned homo sapiens is approaching obsolescence and requires a technological upgrade. Such is the comprehension of dhamma attained by this diligent student of Vipassana, Goenka style!
WTF is wrong with these people, I wondered, these angry meditators whose practice has not only failed to soften them, but actually sent them in the opposite direction? Well, I looked into it and I found out! I discovered how Goenka modified the ten day Vipassana course he inherited from Sayagyi U Ba Khin and changed its emphasis. I did so empirically, because it is not discussed. In order to understand fully, I sat several courses at the IMC in Wiltshire (two before Mother Sayamagyi passed in January 2017).
So, what did I find out? I'm not telling! The teacher at the IMC told me to keep it to myself. It is not for a humble student to criticise a master such as S.N.Goenka, from whom I learned many important lessons over seven years and for which I am suitably grateful. To kvetch would negate my own hard-won experience over long hours on the meditation mat and potentially offend Goenka's devotees, whose equanimity may not be all it's cracked up to be. Smiley face! (I keep no secrets, so if you must know, contact me privately.)
It's just that I think Goenka went wrong in regard to Right Effort. So, too, I reckon, did Daw Mya Thwin, aka Mother Sayamagyi, another Vipassana teacher authorised by U Ba Khin, who was his deputy manager at the IMC in Rangoon. As the Vipassana resource, Pariyatti, tells: 'For a few years, from 1978 until 1981, Goenkaji and Mother Sayama, as she was known’ - note they omit the honorific suffix, 'gyi' while according their guru the ‘ji’ that is his due - ‘conducted several courses together in India and in England, but afterward began again to teach separately'.
They went their separate ways following a course taught in a huge marquee on the lawn at Splatt's House in Wiltshire in 1981. Pariyatti contends that Satya Narayan Goenka always felt ‘great appreciation and respect’ for Daw Mya Thwin, but it might be more accurate to say that the Great Man could not submit to the spiritual authority of a Burmese housewife. Not that I may know very much about that, because no sincere student in the IMC tradition propagated by Mother Sayamagyi would idly discuss it. To do so would be, akulśala, conduct unbecoming a peaceful practitioner of Theravada Buddhism.
I would never claim to be Buddhist, but I do know where the path lies, even if I don’t conscientiously walk it. A lesson I had to learn at Splatt's was Right Speech. Which is one reason for my reticence in recent years. I still enjoy a wind-up, but have toned down the banter and don't rise to online provocation. I try to stick to what's accurate, constructive, well-intentioned and necessary.
Most internet chatter is unnecessary and responding to it futile, but surely it behoves one to speak out against genocide? I do not concur with the facile aphorism, 'silence is violence', but nobody in their right mind wants to be complicit. If I feel the need to say something incendiary, however, I'll prolly wait for David Icke to say it first. Likesay, I've struggled to write about Icke. I fear my joke about my uncommunicative nonagenarian Uncle taking Icke family secrets to his grave may come back to haunt me.