The US, Israel and the normalisation of scandal

Thanks to Netanyahu and Trump, scandal is now our new normal – call it ‘Everythinggate’.

In late April, the Hondurasgate platform and the Spanish media outlet Canal Red began leaking incriminating audios regarding recent machinations by the United States and Israel in Latin America.

One batch of audios, for example, indicates that Israel financed the release from prison of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the US for drug trafficking and other transgressions. As per the write-up on the Hondurasgate website, Hernandez will now play a key role in carrying out US-Israeli military and economic designs in the region.

The name Hondurasgate is, of course, a play on “Watergate,” the notorious political scandal that rocked Washington in the 1970s and ended the presidency of Richard Nixon. And yet the current scandal has failed to, well, scandalise. The news has been largely ignored by the Western corporate media, although various Spanish-language outlets have reported it.

There are a few possible reasons for the lack of interest. The first is that the US and its Israeli accomplice have a lengthy history of dirty tricks in Latin America – arming right-wing dictators, training death squads in the art of slaughtering peasants, and so forth – which renders the Honduras leaks slightly less than shocking.

The second, perhaps, is that the world has reached such a distinctly abominable state that nothing really shocks us any more.

It bears recalling that Hernandez, a convicted felon, was pardoned by US President Donald Trump – another convicted felon – in December, just one month before Trump oversaw the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on trumped-up narcoterrorism charges.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasted no time in showering congratulations upon the US military for its “perfect operation” in Caracas. Never mind that it was illegal in every possible way – as is Trump’s other novel tactic of randomly blowing up boats in the vicinity of Venezuela and extrajudicially murdering the folks on board.

No sooner had we all begun to process the Maduro abduction, however, than Trump was off on a new mission to starve Cuba and otherwise thwart life on the island. Then at the end of February, the US and Israel decided to launch a demented war on Iran, embroiling the Middle East and nudging the entire planet towards apocalypse. On April 7, the US head of state very professionally warned the Iranians that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again”.

In short, everyday news these days reads like some sort of sick version of the satirical news site The Onion. But the sheer ubiquity of scandal ultimately has a desensitising effect. Bombarded by shocking stimuli from all directions, we cease to be shocked.

Scandal, in other words, is the new normal. Call it Everythinggate.

To some extent, of course, this has always been the case. Israel has always massacred Arabs, the US has always wrought havoc in every corner of the globe, and politicians have always said and done ludicrous things.

But Trump and Netanyahu take it to another level, in part due to a shared megalomaniacal drive to perpetrate unhinged acts of barbarism with impunity, and in part because the propagation of international atrocities can be a useful distraction from domestic scandals.

After all, why deal with corruption charges or the Epstein files when you can just commit genocide and bomb Iran?

While Netanyahu prefers to maintain a sort of Hannibal Lecter-style composure in his public dealings, Trump is not one to hold back. On May 7, he posted a typically surreal rant to his Truth Social platform, in which he recounted a US attack on Iranian drones, which “dropped ever so beautifully down to the Ocean, very much like a butterfly dropping to its grave!”

The president went on to specify that “Iran is not a normal Country” and is instead “led by LUNATICS.” Granted, the Iranians are not the ones uploading AI-generated images of themselves as Jesus – or in AI swim trunks and golden inflatable chair in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, for that matter.

A recent would-be tabloid contender – but for the fact that it is 100 percent true – has to do with the 50th birthday celebration, on May 6, of Netanyahu’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. His birthday cake was decorated with none other than a golden noose, in honour of a new law authorising the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners but not for Jewish citizens of Israel.

At the celebration, Ben-Gvir received a phone call from Netanyahu, with whom he had a hearty laugh after the prime minister charmingly guessed his age to be 17.

And with all the scandals to choose from at the moment, the normalisation of scandal is pretty scandalous, too.