"The media squabble over Shchepotin’s final day at the Cancer Institute, and the doubts it raised over the motivation of all concerned, were appropriate, because the most corrosive aspect of corruption is the way that it undermines trust. When corruption is widespread, it becomes impossible to know whom to believe, since the money infects every aspect of state and society. Every newspaper article can be criticized as paid for, every politician can be called corrupt, every court decision can be called into question. Charities are set up by oligarchs to lobby for their interests, and those then provoke doubts about every other non-governmental organization. If even doctors are on the take, can you trust their diagnoses? Are they claiming a patient needs treatment only because that would be to their profit? If policemen are crooked, and courts are paid for, are criminals really criminals? Or are they honest people who interfered in criminals’ business? Not knowing whom to believe, you retreat into trusting only those closest to you—your oldest friends, and your relatives—and that reinforces the divisions in society that corruption thrives on. It is impossible to build a thriving economy, or a healthy democracy, without a society whose members fundamentally trust each other. If you take that away, you are left with something far darker and more mercenary."
When the Warning Comes from the General Moshe Ya’alon, Jewish Supremacy, and the Echo Nobody Wanted to Hear
History has a cruel sense of irony. Sometimes the most devastating indictments do not come from the oppressed, the bombed, the buried, or the silenced—but from the very architects of power who once swore they were different. This week, that indictment came from Moshe Ya’alon : former Israeli Defense Minister, former IDF Chief of Staff, lifelong pillar of Israel’s security establishment. Not a dissident poet. Not a radical academic. Not a Palestinian survivor. A general. And what he said shattered the last polite illusion. “ The ideology of Jewish supremacy that has become dominant in the Israeli government is reminiscent of Nazi race theory.” Pause there. Sit with it. This was not shouted at a protest . It was not scribbled on a placard. It was written calmly, deliberately, after attending a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony —then reading reports of Jewish settlers attacking Palestinians , blocking ambulances , fracturing skulls , burning homes. Never Again, apparently, now ...
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