The David McWilliams Podcast

One of the best podcasts around, love it.

Pseudo-intellectual, boomer brained centrist dad monetising rambling pontifications, assorted brain f@rts and luxury beliefs with his production team in highly successful podcast. Entertaining. Williams has gift of the gab, but usually very wrong. (anti-English digs in every episode belies a thinly veiled seething resentment, and his obsession with William of Orange his sectarian instincts (who btw has zero connection with the American term ‘hillbillly’ as claimed)

David McWilliams built the larger part of his career on being right when everyone else was being wrong. His latest thoughts on Gaza, however, are wrong on many levels. David’s podcast “Recognise Palestine, Now What?” is an exercise in convincing popel that an imagined embarrassment is worse than a real and current nightmare. In reference to Ireland’s recognition of the state of Palestine, David asks: What if that state turns into a medieval Islamic fundamentalist state? Wouldn’t it be so embarrassing to have picked the wrong side? David is a ‘sides’ man. He’s a ‘war of civilizations’ man. His claims come hot on the heels of Salman Rushdie ludicrously claiming that a Palestinians State would be like the Taliban. Both Mr. McWilliam’s and Mr. Rushdie have in common the ability to set current Palestinian suffering aside, for the sake of rumination. Despite having lived and worked in Israel, he has in the past demonstrated a tendency to misunderstand facets of the conflict on a fundamental level. For example, when the Israeli political establishment floated the idea of annexing parts of the West Bank, McWilliams blustered on his Podcast that if they did, Israel would cease to be a democracy and become an apartheid state. In fact, Israel is already an apartheid state, as recognised by three world leading human rights NGOs, one of them Israeli. On that occasion, David McWilliams confusingly mischaracterized the proposed annexation as being of the whole West Bank, when in actually fact it would have excluded all the major Palestinian population centres and locked them further into their stateless limbo (Because, as many people are aware and in keeping with its apartheid nature, Israel’s power structures don’t care much for Palestinians.) This time round, his and Rushdie’s concepts are music to the ears of Zionists, particularly American Zionists who are scrambling to validate themselves and their support for a country that has killed so many innocent people over the last 8 months. In David’s world, these dead Palestinians and Israelis are a terrible, terrible thing. Ireland has made the correct moral decision, he affirms, but strategically? There’s cause for more chin scratching on that one. It is the definition of privilege to be able to set aside the urgent desperation of the now and replace it with hypothesis. David McWilliams has played to the fears of a certain demographic: those for whom tens of thousands of dead civilians are truly only a statistic; a line on a graph to be taken into consideration for sure, but not quite as meaningful as the line denoting the value of shares on the worlds major stock exchanges. To aid the sleep of those who are primarily concerned with economics rather than morality, McWilliams breezily skirts past the undoubted multilateral, internationalized process which would aid the birthing of a Palestinian State. He also doesn’t bother to weigh up the actual threat a tiny Palestinian State, completely surrounded and militarily curtailed by Israel would have to the world, even if it was fully Islamified. His thoughts are concentrated on the dim view Western nations and Western investors might take toward Ireland if a pluralist Palestinian society suddenly donned the Taliban’s clothes on attaining statehood. David may have spent time in Israel, but I would wager he did not spend so much time amongst Palestinians, otherwise he wouldn’t think that. The podcast was a salient representation of how Western colonialism continues to sell itself to the dominant power structures. David McWilliams obfuscates and prevaricates, creating plenty of wriggle room for the ‘but I also said..’ response when objections come his way. However, the central message is clear: National self determination is for everyone, but some people’s right to national self determination is more important than others. Strategically, McWilliam’s posits, we just gotta decide which side we’re on: Our Western Civilization, which values Israel’s military and tech sector so highly, or those uncivilized types our side likes to bomb and whose children are perceived to lie in the debit column as economic units. His thoughts are as strategically valuable and morally vacuous as any neo-liberal geo- political world view could possibly conceive, and a great disappointment to anyone caught in the horrible urgency of the current grief.

There you go again lads. Criticise the UK govt by all means but lay off the "Brit" bashing. where's the evidence the UK is actively "shipping" asylum seekers to Ireland?