Gaza Genocide: The Abysmal Moral Failure of the ‘West’
SPOTLIGHT, 29 Apr 2024
Jeremy Salt | Palestine Chronicle - TRANSCEND Media Service
The majority of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza are women and children.
(Photo: Mahmoud Ajjour, The Palestine Chronicle)
22 Apr 2024 – There is little that could be more uncivilized, cruel and barbarous than the crimes Israel is committing or more morally depraved than the complicity of the governments helping it along.
Take 1:
Washington DC: The airlift of machetes into Rwanda continued today despite the continued killing of Tutsi men, women and children by Hutu extremists. At the same time, tents and food aid are being flown in for the victims of violence following congressional approval of an emergency aid package.
The US defended what appeared to be contradictions in the administration’s ‘kill and feed’ policy.
“We have pointed out many times that the Hutu authorities have the right of self-defense,” a State Department source who declined to be named said. “We deeply regret that machetes provided for agricultural purposes are being used by some extremists for other purposes but we are not going to play the blame game. We will continue to provide food aid to the victims of violence on both sides.
“The Hutu leadership has apologized for the church massacre and has ordered an investigation into the apparent cause, a breakdown in the chain of command. We have advised restraint but for the moment the supply of machetes will continue, as we do not want to further destabilize the situation.”
Take 2:
Washington DC: As the death toll in Gaza rises, the airlift of arms into Israel continued today. At the same time, tents and food aid are being flown in following congressional and White House approval of an emergency aid package.
The US defended what appeared to be apparent contradictions in the administration’s ‘kill and feed’ policy. “We have pointed out many times that Israel has the right of self-defense,” said a State Department source, who declined to be named. “We deeply regret that civilians are dying but we do stress that the Palestinians would not be in this situation if they were not Palestinian. Beyond that, we are not going to play the blame game.
“While we have repeatedly urged restraint, the supply of precision-guided munitions, small bombs, bunker buster bombs, tank ammunition, F35A fighter jets, Hellfire missiles, 155mm cannon, night vision goggles, grenades, mortars, small arms and ammunition will continue, as we do not want to further destabilize the situation.”
The New York Times editors have advised their correspondents against the use of loaded expressions such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupied territory, refugee camps, Palestine and the nakba. Slaughter, massacre and carnage may be used but only when the terrorist attack of October 7 is being described.
Criticized for excluding what some critics described as “these important reference points,” a spokesperson for the editors said that “we are not going to play the blame game by emotive reporting of what is happening. We tell our readers what we think they need to know, not what our critics seem to think they need to know. End of story as far as we are concerned.”
Take 3:
London, May 1943: Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jew living in London who had spent a year trying unsuccessfully to draw the attention of world governments to a Bundist report on the extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, issued his final statement before taking his own life.
“The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first place on the perpetrators, but indirectly it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purposes of curtailing this crime,” he writes.
“By passive observation of this murder of defenceless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women and old men, these countries have become the criminals’ accomplices. I cannot be silent …. As I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.”
Then he put down his pen, took sleeping pills and died.
Take 4:
Take 1 could be true if the Hutus were enmeshed in and vital to US strategic and corporate horrors. The White House, the State Department and the media would have found some way of holding the Tutsis at least partly responsible for their own fate. The Hutu leadership’s horror at the crimes committed by extremists would have been headlined over the latest casualty figures.
A full investigation was already underway, readers/viewers would be told, and justice would be served, the State Department spokesperson would have emphasized. In the meantime the supply of machetes would continue, with the repeated warning that in absolutely no circumstances were they to be used for any other purpose than cutting down maize and bananas.
Take 2 is largely true, down to the internal censorship of the NYT, and Take 3 is wholly true.
What would Szmul Zygielbojm say today had he lived through the genocide of the Jews only to witness a genocide in Gaza different in scale but not in essence and committed not against Jews but by them?
He would surely be horrified, as many Jews around the world are: this is not Judaism as they see it but its corruption in the form of the parasitic outgrowth that has hijacked its symbols and manipulated its history.
Aaron Bushnell killed himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC because of “what people have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers” and because he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”
Zygielbojm and Bushnell stand beside each other and many others in history who have been driven to the breaking point in an amoral political world. The same indifference noted by Zygielbojm is the reality behind the mask of humanitarian concern worn by the heads of ‘western‘ governments and their ministers.
The people of the world are horrified, repulsed beyond measure, but they are not. These governments are literally watching Israel slaughter Palestinians, doing nothing to stop it and everything to encourage it by supplying the weapons needed to continue the genocide. They are handing the machetes to the Hutus.
Nothing shifts them, not the massacre of children, not the sniping murder of children, not the burying of children in rubble, not the destruction of hospitals and schools, not the denial of food and medical aid and other essentials of life, not death by deliberate starvation, not the bombing of Gaza’s Al Basma IVF clinic (4000 embryos destroyed), not the bombing of the dead in their cemeteries, not even quadcopters put to sadistic use by broadcasting the crying of children and the wailing of mothers to lure Palestinians into the streets so they can be killed.
In early April, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention found that Israel is committing genocide across Palestine, in the West Bank as well as Gaza, not a “plausible” genocide as the ICJ has ruled but an actual genocide but these heads of government and government ministers still have nothing to say.
No savage tribe has ever killed so many people so leisurely, so joyfully, so remorselessly so sadistically and cruelly as the uniformed men and women swarming across the Gaza they have destroyed.
They are not savages but the nice young woman with a pony tail who kills remotely with a drone before going to the gym to work out and the nice young man who never misses his grandmother’s birthday, cheering as his unit blows up a school or as he fires a missile into a block of flats from his F35A. The thought that he is probably killing other grandmothers must not occur to him.
The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes savage pertaining to people as primitive and uncivilised, and savagery as behaving in a cruel and barbarous manner.
There is little that could be more uncivilized, cruel and barbarous than the crimes Israel is committing or more morally depraved than the complicity of the governments helping it along, in the full knowledge of what they are doing.
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Jeremy Salt taught at the University of Melbourne, at Bosporus University in Istanbul and Bilkent University in Ankara for many years, specializing in the modern history of the Middle East. Among his recent publications is his 2008 book, The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands (University of California Press).
Go to Original – palestinechronicle.com
Tags: Colonialism, Crimes against Humanity, Ecocide, Ethnic Cleansing, Famine, Gaza, Genocide, Genocide Convention, Hamas, Hunger, International Court of Justice ICJ, Israel, Israeli occupation, Massacre, Palestine, USA, United Nations, War crimes, West Bank
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One Response to “Gaza Genocide: The Abysmal Moral Failure of the ‘West’”
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RE “Aaron Bushnell”
What Bushnell’s desperate act exposes is that some 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices such as the current US-Israeli Holocaust of the Palestinians, just like all the “bad German people” during the Nazi Holocaust, whom they are happily pointing the finger to as examples of OTHER PEOPLE who are bad and evil in their deep dishonesty, self-delusion, and madness.
He pointed exactly this reality out in one of his last statements:
“Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
Now WHY is it that 95-99% of people anywhere DO NOTHING when confronted with grave injustices? Because “advanced” humans have a malignant disease called a “Soullessness Spectrum Disorder” …. https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html
Because of this big truth Bushnell is pointing to lots of truth-hating cowardly soulless people resort to slandering Bushnell as mentally disturbed or fanatical, having been suicidal (he was not), etc. or try to misrepresent him negatively in some other form –anything in order to NOT see the real truth about themselves.
“America is the greatest exporter of violence the world has ever known. So wear your patriotism on your sleeve and be proud. You are a depraved citizen of the world’s worst killer nation.” — Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., economist & former US regime official, in 2015
“I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest, but compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine, at the hands of their colonizers (=the genocidal US regime and its genocidal Israeli colony), it’s not extreme at all.” — Aaron Bushnell, shortly before he set himself on fire
If you have been injected with Covid jabs/bioweapons and are concerned verify what batch number you were injected with at https://howbadismybatch.com
“We can have the world of our dreams tomorrow, but we have to be willing to fight today.” — Aaron Bushnell, in 2023