The dialectic of… what?

idf-selfie

One surely ought to be able to make something of this, but damned if I know what:

A New Facebook Page Dedicated to the IDF Is Being Flooded With Sexy Selfies

Women are stripping down for sexy selfies to show their support for the Israel Defense Forces[ IDF; Israel’s euphemistic term for its conquistador armed forces — ed. ]

Submissions are pouring in from all over the world on the Standing With IDF Facebook page, with women are inscribing pro-IDF messages on their body before snapping pictures. After just two days, the page has received more than 16,000 likes on Facebook.

Most of the pictures feature women with “I <3 IDF” emblazoned on various body parts, but the page celebrated 15,000 likes by featuring a photo of a girl who had written “Fuck Hamas” on her butt cheeks.

Curiously, the page seems to have been taken down, but there are a few NSFW samples here.

I really hate it when people my age wax all moralistic and analytical about the latest youth fad. And really, I don’t disapprove of young people having a good time. In fact I rather like the idea; wish I’d been more fun-loving myself when I was young. Nevertheless there’s something about this nexus that tempts me very strongly to indulge in such alter-kaker ruminations. They pay for a gym to remodel their bodies into some approximation of an arbitrary ideal, and often enough pay for a surgeon to make up the difference. Then without being paid for it, they donate the work product, in the form of selfies, to machines of exploitation and commodification like Facebook. And now we see the hookup of this particular fun business with a project of genocide. Fascism has become much sexier since the PG-rated days of Kraft durch Freude.

The chap who set up the Facebook page also has one for dudes who want to show their support in the same way. Apparently it hasn’t been so popular. A quick look, which I cannot in all conscience recommend, will show why. The Zio-broskys look terrible, and lack entirely the louche Levantine charm of their female counterparts.

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Update: I’m told that the relatively unpopular (and quite unlovely) site for Zio-boyo selfies has been taken down too. Ordinarily I don’t approve of anything Facebook does, but this is really a public service.

20 thoughts on “The dialectic of… what?

  1. Being one who likewise shies from lambasting kids today, I think getting sexy’d-up for the world around us is pretty much a given human imperative and that the general trend in social media has magnified how stupid it looks the way social media makes everything look stupid and magnified, and made more visible the extreme way people channel that energy.

    What I take away from this particular slew of selfies relates to the truism that the war on terror creates terrorists, which is good for the war business: these photos, as lascivious as they may or may not be, are only provocative towards the enemy, and directly proportional to the “extremity of their backward faith”.

  2. Max Blumenthal’s Goliath has a 2 page chapter called ‘The Beauty Brigade’:

    Other than Eritrea, a country ruled by a despotic military regime trapped in a perpetual border war with Ethiopia, Israel is the only country in the world that requires women to serve in the military…

    Instead of earning respect by displaying military élan, as their male counterparts do, women soldiers are often induced into the role of “mattresses,” realizing their value to the state through sexual availability and by maintaining an impeccably prim, alluring appearance. In the words of Ezer Weizman, a former Israeli president and commander of the country’s Air Force, “The best men to the cockpit, the best women to the pilots.”…

    Upon their induction into the army, female soldiers are designated as members of a women’s corps called Chen, which means “beauty” and “grace” in Hebrew–the Beauty Brigade. While male soldiers focus on maximizing their physical prowess, many women are provided with beauty tips and help on custom tailoring their uniforms for maximum sex appeal. In turn, they are used as props in pro-army propaganda, with comely female soldiers in full makeup appearing frequently on the covers of Israeli newspapers, presenting the military as a heavily armed Ibiza…

    With big guns in their hands, female soldiers appear capable of eliminating the thing they are told to fear the most: the Arab male…[b]ut cases of Arabs raping female Israeli soldiers have always been extremely rare and are now virtually unheard of. In reality, young Israeli women are far more likely to be raped or abused by the male soldier assigned to them as their protector. A survey provided to the Knesset Committee for the Advancement of the Status of Women in the Israeli army in 2003 found that one out of three female soldiers had been sexually attacked during her service, and that at least 80 percent had suffered from sexual harassment. Over a quarter had been offered rewards in exchange for sex, while almost 70 percent said that they had encountered an unwanted sexual proposition. The survey exposed a terrifying culture of rape that demanded the sexual servitude of young Israeli women while training them to view their attackers as guardians.

    “Israel is so small, you don’t need prostitution,” Gur commented. “The soldiers just go to their wives or girlfriends, or inside the army on the weekend. The women are so available there–they are part of the militarization by serving the army with sex.”…

    Neomi, a former soldier whose experience transformed her into a radical feminist activist, reflected to Harmat, “I still cannot believe how I was treated during my military service–like a whore, like a piece of meat–with chauvinist songs and jokes. I feel that the education system, and for sure the military, tried to educate me to be a small, obeying, lovely wife that gives birth to many new soldiers. Fuck them! It took me years to overcome this, but I will do anything to assist other women to not fall for it.”

  3. The promise of differential reproductive success in exchange for the extermination of competitive outgroups…would seem to be the straightforward sociobiological interpretation. Sociobio or otherwise, really; it’s hard to ignore the face value of the gesture. She might as well be presenting herself in lordosis.

    • I could start by answering my own question: Completely understandable, even predictable, response to a grotesque, ongoing massacre. “Unfortunate civilian casualities,” as someone from the IDF, or from a US think tank, might put it.

      • Conveniently buried deep in the article: “around Europe the new anti-Semitism is being seen a phenomenon confined to Arab and Muslim communities.”

        Two things: I’d put quote marks around “anti-Semitism.” And then take a look at the “fire and smoke” photo — it of course explains the source of the Arab-Muslim rage rather well, doesn’t it?

        • I once read an article by someone who posed the question, “If you get thrown out of a thousand different stores by a thousand different shopkeepers accusing you of shoplifting, how many stores do you have to be thrown out of before you stop getting to claim that all the shopkeepers are lying racists?”

          On a separate note, just yesterday, I was reading about how Ishmael was cursed for polluting his cherished bloodline by being willing to sleep with a Canaanite wife. His brother, of course, was much wiser, and inbred with a cousin, earning Yahweh’s approval.

      • The sad thing is that the last time the boy cried wolf, there really was a wolf. Of course to make the analogy work, it would have to be a wolf that the boy himself raised from a cub.

        I tend to think that worrying about anti-Semitism, at this point in history, is silly to the extent that it’s sincere, and contemptible to the extent that it’s not. But one can’t exclude the possibility that Israel’s apologists may have succeeded in conflating the ideas of Judaism, Jewishness and Zionism in the minds of some of their enemies as well as their friends. Israel itself claims to be the state of the Jewish people. Nobody ought to believe this; but when somebody does, who is to blame?

        • I’m not so sure how much distance to put between the Jewish religion and Zionism. Judaism itself is a racist, supremacist faith, viewing the Jews as God’s special snowflakes destined to rule the world in his name. The Chosen are born, not made, which suggests a genetic birthright and superiority.

          God has also given them an eternal lease on a particular piece of land they’ve been absent from for two thousand years–assuming the people calling themselves Jews nowadays can actually trace their origins to Palestine, as opposed to Poland.

          This belief segues rather neatly into the racist, supremacist ideology of Zionism, even the secular variety. As the old joke goes, Zionists are mostly atheists who don’t believe in God, but they believe he gave Israel to the Jews.

          I may be overstating the case against Judaism. I just don’t give a fuck anymore about presenting a more nuanced view. Direct any complaints to the people of Gaza.

  4. G-Strings for Genocide!

    If someone wants to turn her keister into a billboard for mass murder, don’t let me ruin the party. But I have little doubt what the response from the Jezebel/Salon.com types would be if a group of “white males” wrote “Fuck Israel” on their uncircumsized meat weasels and posted it on Facebook. There would be no weasel words in denouncing them for the sexist, anti-semitic, rape culture-promoting exhibitionist pigs they are. Any criticism of low self-esteem young girls “objectifying” themselves for the entertainment of boorish men is of course denounced as (slut) “shaming” though conservatively dressed women with “Support Our Troops” signs can be shamed in the most degrading terms as “white trash rednecks” without a whiffle. I tend to feel those who promote war and genocide deserve all the shame they can handle and a helluva lot they can’t handle, whether they are wearing a cardigan or butt floss.

    Women have always played a crucial role in encouraging men to go to war through sexual enticements and shaming tactics, though I suppose having a bare bottom waved in your face is a step up from getting a white feather. This tactic has merely been updated with appropriate sleaziness to get today’s Herrenvolk ginned up for genocide. Seems to be working.

  5. This just in from the Guardian and off course, no mention of this on the front page of the Zionist Times:

    http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/28/israel-gaza-us-ceasefire-diplomacy-criticism-kerry

    Apparently, that douche bag Kerry is being shit on by Israel. The following paragraph removes all your doubts about the rabid nature of these morons:

    “Meanwhile, Ari Shavit, a correspondent for the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz, reported on Monday: “Very senior officials in Jerusalem described the proposal that Kerry put on the table as a ‘strategic terrorist attack’.” ”

    And scroll down to see a picture of a patriotic New Yorker in a pro Israel rally. Shame, shame, shame.

  6. Not enough dead babies in the park:

    Quoting Jason Ditz at antiwar.com:
    A new Pentagon request for $225 million in “emergency” aid for Israel, above and beyond the billions sent there annually, was panned by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid as far too low.

    “We should not give the Israeli people the minimum amount of aid and then cross our fingers and hope it all works out in the future,” insisted Reid, without detailing exactly how many more hundreds of millions of dollars he would throw at Israel.

    Now Reid is a guy who know HOW to “heart the IDF”….

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