Why Zionism-Nazism Comparisons Are Legitimate

Created on Tuesday, 12 August 2014 21:17

I strongly believe that Jews around the world, including those in Israel, ought to be constantly reminded of the evil crimes committed in Palestine under their collective name, as well as understand the close ideological similarity between Nazism and Zionism.

This, I believe, is a legitimate tool to get Jews, especially those who still value justice and honesty, to reconsider their identification and infatuation with this evil entity and its equally nefarious ideology and actions.

Jews all around the world simply can’t love Israel and support its wanton criminality against the Palestinian people, while at the same time continuing to lecture the world about the evils of Nazism. Moral consistency is absolutely paramount.

Supporting oppression and racism is as bad as practicing oppression and racism. Indeed, oppression such as occupation can’t persist for a long time without the material and moral support and backing by people who may often look nice and speak softly.  Many of the supporters of Apartheid in South Africa and Nazism in Germany also looked very nice and spoke softly, not knowing (or knowing) that they were tacitly backing evil, racist criminals committing ghastly crimes against humanity.

Zionism (the central embodiment of which is the apartheid Israeli state) is evil, because of its racist evil ideology and criminal actions and behavior in Palestine.

Zionism has declared all Jews a distinct ethnicity, just as the Nazis had declared all Germans a distinct ethnicity.

Both Zionism and Nazism strove to build a ‘state’ that would be ‘redeemed’ through violent purification (in the case of Nazi Germany) and ‘an Iron wall’ (in the case of Zionist Israel).

In both instances, ethnic cleansing was the main tool used to obliterate the ‘inferiors,’ the ‘water carriers and wood hewers’ in order to create ‘German-only’ settlements in Europe and ‘Jewish-only’ settlements in Palestine.

In all honesty, there are no fundamental differences between Jewish national socialism (Zionism) and German national socialism (Nazism). The Nazis preached the ‘Master Race’ to justify Nazism while Zionists adopted the ancient myth of the ‘Chosen People’ to justify Zionism.

Moreover, we can’t really ignore the absolute similarity between the Zionist ethnic conquest of Palestine and the implanting therein of ‘Jewish settlers’ at the expense of the native Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and the Nazi drive for ‘Lebensraum’ in Poland and the importation of ‘Aryans’ at the expense of the indigenous population.

Yes, there in Europe, the Nazis sought to steal the Sudetenland and here in Palestine, the Zionists are stealing the West Bank. The arguments are the same, the lies are the same and the means are nearly identical.

We need to highlight these similarities and the ‘common ground’ between Zionism and Nazism, irrespective of how many people will be upset by these comparisons. The truth is always a paramount value in itself.

There is no doubt that the Third Reich committed monstrous crimes against helpless Jews far greater than those committed by Israel against the equally helpless Palestinians.  Yes, we all know about Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen Belsen, Treblinka, and the other detention camps where many Jews, mainly non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, perished at the hands of the Nazi exterminators.

However, let us ask ourselves the following question: Were the Nazis ‘Nazi’ only because they created and used gas chambers to incinerate their Jewish and non-Jewish victims?  Would the Nazis have been less evil and therefore ‘less Nazi’ if they had annihilated their victims by way of bullets instead of ovens, or by starving them to death as Israel has been doing to the Palestinians?  Besides, if Jews had the right to call the “Exodus Ship” a floating Auschwitz, why is it wrong for the Palestinians to describe as “Nazi” the ongoing extirpation of an entire people from their ancestral homeland? Do Jew have an exclusive right to call their critics and enemies  “Nazi” while others, e.g. the Palestinians, don’t have a similar right to call Israeli crimes and criminals “Nazi”?

Besides, should we refrain from using the Nazi epithets to describe the racist criminals of our time, wherever they happen to be and regardless of what religion they adhere to, until and unless they start using gas chambers to exterminate their victims?

More to the point, by what logic are Israel and its supporters using the Second World War (a cruel war in which a few million Jews, as well as nearly 50 million non-Jews, perished), as a justification and cover-up to dispossess, dehumanize and ethnically cleanse the indigenous Palestinian people?

Well, Israel could theoretically annihilate most Palestinians with nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, or simply through a sustained campaign of massive artillery bombardment and aerial bombing.  Would such an act make Israelis less ‘Nazi’?

I want to ask those who might rave and rant against me the following question:  At what point should we start calling  Israel  ‘Nazi’? When the number of its victims reaches one million? Two million? Or perhaps six million?  Or when the Zionists start introducing Zyklon B to kill us? Or when 90% of Palestinians are packed into detention camps, surrounded by 8-meter high concrete walls fitted with watchtowers that are manned by trigger-happy Zionist Gestapo?

I know some Zionist apologists will be prompted, almost instinctively, to argue that, unlike Israel, the Third Reich had devised a plan, a final solution, to exterminate all Jews in Europe and the world.

Well, regardless of the historical authenticity of such a claim, I would challenge the Zionists and their supporters and apologists to prove that Israel doesn’t harbor a final solution for the Palestinians.

Isn’t the brutal extirpation of virtually an entire people from their historical motherland tantamount to a kind of final solution? Isn’t ethnic cleansing a form of a final solution? How about the continuing starvation, encirclement, and hounding of the Palestinians? Besides, is there a fundamental difference between attempting to destroy an entire people pursuant to a plan and attempting to destroy them without a plan? Wouldn’t the ultimate outcome be the same?

Don’t invoke the calumny of terror.  We know and you know and the whole world knows that words like ‘terror,’  ‘terrorists,’  ‘axis of evil’ and ‘enemies of freedom’ are all ideological terms used tendentiously by the powerful and the arrogant, such as Israel and the United States, to justify their own true terror against the weak and the oppressed. Even Satan himself would call his enemies terrorists.

In the final analysis, ‘terror’ is the poor man’s war against the powerful and the arrogant, and ‘war’ is the strong man’s terror against the weak and the oppressed.

Yes, the scope of the Nazi Holocaust is greater than that of the criminal Zionist occupation of Palestine. But the mentality, the psychology, the malice, the hatefulness, and especially the sheer evil intent in both cases are certainly not that far apart from each other.

There is no doubt in my mind that Israel would have exterminated, or at least tried to exterminate, the Palestinian people a long time ago had the ‘objective circumstances’ been available. Needless to say ‘objective circumstances’ here could mean a huge international event (for example, a nuclear war, a global national disaster, or a gigantic event of some sort) that would divert or shift international attention from such a genocidal feat.

It is true that Israel would prefer to ‘solve the problem’ without a campaign of mass murder and mass terror, like bullying and terrorizing the Palestinians, or the vast majority of them, into leaving their ancestral homeland.

However, there is no doubt that Israel would contemplate resorting to the ‘worst scenario’ in case the Palestinians clung to their homeland and remained steadfast in their homes and towns and villages.

In 2001, a few days after the 9/11 events in the US, then Israeli Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer bragged about how the international media’s preoccupation with events in the US enabled Israel to kill more Palestinians in the West Bank without being censured by the international community.

Similarly, the former Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, told students at Bar Ilan University in 1989 that “Israel should have exploited the repression of the demonstration in China (the Tiananmen Square events) where world attention was focused on that country, to carry out mass expulsion among the Arabs of the territories.”

Even today, Israeli leaders say brazenly that they wish to wake up to see all of us dead.

Indeed, the Palestinian national demise has always been and continues to be Zionism’s ultimate goal, this is why Zionism doesn’t really recognize our very existence as a people, and when it does or is forced to do so under the pressure of reality, it insists that Palestine is Jordan and that Amman, not Jerusalem, is the capital of Palestine.

In addition, there is no doubt that the daily acts of murder, terror, humiliation, and savagery which ordinary Palestinians are routinely subjected to at the hands of trigger-happy Israeli soldiers manning checkpoints and roadblocks throughout the occupied territories are comparable in many aspects to the same acts of humiliation and terror Jews and non-Jews had to endure in Nazi-occupied Europe.

The Nazis imprinted serial numbers on the forearms of Jewish internees, and the Israelis have done the same to the Palestinians.

The Nazis treated Jews as mere numbers rather than human beings, and the Israelis have done the same with the Palestinians.

The Gestapo savaged, brutalized, and starved Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto to break their collective will, and Israel has been doing the same to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Nazis practiced all kinds of sadistic behavior with Jews, like for example, forcing Jewish musicians to play music for Gestapo and Wehrmacht soldiers, and the Israelis have done the same in the West Bank at the checkpoints.

I don’t know if Jews were forced to drink German soldiers’ urine as Israeli border policemen on several occasions have forced their Palestinian victims to do.

During the years of the two Intifadas (uprisings), I traveled throughout the West Bank, passing through Israeli army checkpoints and roadblocks. There, I saw the extent to which Israeli soldiers, many of them grandchildren of Holocaust survivors, behave bestially towards helpless Palestinians.

I saw soldiers murder innocent people on the spot for no genuine reason. I saw soldiers force young Palestinians to strip naked and stand for hours under heavy rain. I saw soldiers relaxed and enjoying the pain and suffering inflicted on thousands of Palestinians, passengers, and motorists whose only ‘fault’ was that of being Palestinian and weak.

I saw face to face the obscene sadistic acts practiced by Jews against their helpless victims.  This behavior is not played out in isolated incidents.  This is the norm, not the exception.

The Nazi-like occupation of Palestine by Israel is not the act of a few Israeli Jews. It is not even the act of the military establishment alone.  It is the collective act of a morally desensitized society that has nearly lost its humanity and succumbed to a collective psychosis that is not unlike the moral blindness that struck the German people more than sixty years ago.

Today, most Jews are more or less either enthusiastically supportive or silent and apathetic about the atrocities being perpetrated in their name in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon.

In fact, I would exaggerate little by saying that many, probably a majority, of Israeli Jews are even enjoying and benefiting from the occupation.

In some ways, Palestinians have fared far worse than Hitler’s victims; for the Palestinian tragedy is ongoing and Palestinians, unlike Jews, who still receive compensation for losses dating back sixty years, receive no reparations for lost personal property, not even an acknowledgment from their tormenters of any responsibility for their dispossession.

Sixty years ago Zionists demolished 438 Palestinian villages and poisoned or destroyed wells to ensure that their rightful owners would not return.  Today, Zionists keep on behaving more or less along the same traditions, demolishing homes, destroying farms, and narrowing people’s horizons, all with the goal of making them emigrate.

Today in every junior high school in America, students read Anne Frank, while in every high school Elie Wiesel’s ‘Night’ is requisite reading. This is the man who says brazenly that he readily identifies with Israeli crimes and that he couldn’t bring himself to say bad things about Israel.

The victims of the first Kristallnacht enjoy the world’s approbation and sympathy, while at the same time having succeeded in demonizing an entire people, for whom Kristallnacht still remains a night without end.

But, unlike the German national socialists, Jewish national socialists are falsifying history and reality to justify their crimes against humanity. The Holocaust narrative, which has been elevated to the status of a religion, allows Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, to invoke the mantra ‘Never Again’ while it sits on Arab lands stolen from Ein Karem and overlooking the unmarked graves of Palestinians massacred by Judeo-Nazi terrorists at Deir Yassin.

It is sad, really sad, that most Jews are now finding themselves in the shoes of their former oppressors, knowingly and consciously.

On August 23, 1947, nearly one year before Israel’s birth, Harry Truman wrote the following to Eleanor Roosevelt, apparently in the wake of another Jewish atrocity in Palestine :

“I fear very much that the Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on the top they are just as intolerant and cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.  I regret this situation very much because my sympathy has always been on their side.”

Today, in light of Israel’s Nazi-like behavior in Palestine, it is difficult to view Truman’s prophetic words with indifference.  In fact, it is a moral obligation of the first order to oppose Zionism with the same vigor and same determination the world demonstrated in the face of Nazism.

Some Jews, out of ignorance or tribal loyalty or both, insist that opposition to Zionism is anti-Semitism. Well, if oppression and racism are consistent with being Jewish, then, yes, the world will be obliged to be anti-Jewish in a certain sense. Indeed, if anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism, then anti-Semitism itself becomes a moral obligation upon all conscientious people, as Michael Neumann, Professor of Philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada, so eloquently argues.

“Today, when Israel could have peace for the taking, it conducts another round of dispossession, slowly, deliberately, making Palestine unlivable for Palestinians, and livable for Jews. And the purpose here is not to attain security, as Israeli propagandists and hasbara spinners would want us to believe. The real purpose is the extinction of a people, the Palestinian people.

“And Israel has enough PR-savvy to eliminate the Palestinians with an American rather than a Hitlerian level of violence. This is a kinder, gentler (creeping) genocide that portrays the perpetrators as victims and the victims as terrorists.”

“It is amply clear that Israel is building a racial state, not a religious one. Like my parents, I have always been an atheist. I am entitled by the biology of my birth to Israeli citizenship; you, perhaps, are the most fervent believer in Judaism but are not. Palestinians are being squeezed and killed for me, not for you. They are to be forced into Jordan to perish in a civil war. So no, shooting Palestinian civilians is not like shooting Vietnamese or Chechen civilians. The Palestinians aren’t ‘collateral damage’ in a war against well-armed Communist or separatist forces. They are being shot because Israel thinks all Palestinians should vanish or die, so people with one Jewish grandparent can build subdivisions on the rubble of their homes. This is not the bloody mistake of a blundering but an emerging evil, the deliberate strategy of a state conceived in and dedicated to an increasingly vicious ethnic nationalism.  It has relatively few corpses to its credit so far, but its nuclear weapons can kill perhaps 25 million people in a few hours.”

I frankly don’t believe that the Zionists are morally fit to lecture the world even on the evils of Nazism, and the reason for this lies not only in Zionism’s Nazi-like crimes against the Palestinian people and other peoples in the Middle East. It goes much further than that.

Zionism cooperated and collaborated with Nazism, not necessarily to save Jews, as the paragons of lies would claim, but rather to fulfill  Zionism and Zionist statehood. And in order to expedite the evil goal, the Zionists quietly consented to the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews who could have been saved and sent to other parts of the world, especially North America.

In 1949, the Israeli intelligence employed Walter Rauff, an SS officer who is believed to have been responsible for the murder of at least 100,000 people and was wanted by the Allies as a war criminal. Israel, instead of bringing him to justice it paid him for his services and helped him escape to South America.  Rauff, who had devised a plan to destroy Jews in Palestine, was by no means the only Nazi criminal employed by Israel.

Yes, it is wrong to blame each and every Jew on earth for the crimes of Israel. However, Jews can make a difference if they wish to, by speaking up against Israeli criminality and racism.

Edited from: DesertPeace

Related:

The Israel Lobby

Israel, Gaza, And The False Face Of Barack Obama

Norman Finkelstein On Gaza, Hamas Goals and the Iron Dome Myth

Ilan Pappe: History of Israel – Stolen Land Of Palestine

Solution For Israel-Palestine Conflict

Israel, Gaza And The False Face Of Barack Obama

Created on Tuesday, 12 August 2014 21:21

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know….To show an unfelt sorrow is an office

 Which the false man does easy”

– William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 1.7.83; 2.3.136-37

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over many years of following the political career of United States’ President Barack Obama it is to never underestimate his false-faced cynicism. Examples could fill volumes.  Here I highlight a small number of instances relating to recent, ongoing, and terrible events in the Middle East.

“Trying to Put Iraq Back Together”

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Obama repeatedly told voters that “it’s time to stop spending billions of dollars a week trying to put Iraq back together and start spending the money putting [the US of] America back together” (Janesville, Wisconsin, February 15, 2008).  The candidate was far too knowledgeable and intelligent to have honestly believed that the US was engaged in a benevolent nation-building project in Iraq.  He was too smart not to have understood that the criminal US invasion of that country had killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed vast swaths of social and technical infrastructure and fanned the flames of violent sectarian conflict there. (The horrible consequences of the US invasion are evident in current news reports from devastated Iraq – reports that rarely if ever acknowledge Washington’s critical role in the crippling of Mesopotamia.)

His statement was a cynical ploy for votes from citizens who had long been lied about the real nature and purposes of US foreign policy.

“The Streets of Fallujah”

In late 2006, the all-but-declared presidential candidate Obama made a remarkable statement in support of his claim in a speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs – a speech where he falsely claimed that most US citizens supported US “victory” in Ira.  He proclaimed that “The American people have been extraordinarily resolved. They have seen their sons and daughters killed or wounded in the streets of Fallujah” (Barack Obama, “A Way Forward in Iraq,” Chicago Council on Global Affairs, November 20, 2006).

It was an extraordinarily cynical, cold-blooded selection of locales. Obama certainly knew that Fallujah was the site of colossal U.S. war crimes, including the indiscriminate murder of thousands of civilians, the targeting of ambulances and hospitals, and the practical leveling of an entire city in April and November of 2004. Obama certainly knew also that majority US public opinion was opposed to the one-sided “Iraq War” (the ongoing US imperial assault on Iraq) when he spoke.

“One President at a Time” (2008-09)

Two months after he was first elected to the White House but before his Inauguration, the powerful US-funded and US-equipped military state of Israel unleashed its lethal force on the open-air Israel-imposed prison called the Gaza Strip. Palestinians of Gaza. Israel’s grossly “disproportional response” to alleged provocations by the Palestinian group Hamas included the bombing of hospitals, ambulances, playgrounds, and schools.  Israeli forces engaged in “the shooting of civilians holding white flags, the deliberate and unjustifiable targeting of UN shelters and the killing of over 300 children while the Israeli Army had at their disposal the most precise weaponry in the world.” I quote here from a 2009 United Nations Human Rights Council fact-finding report on “the Gaza War” of 2008-09 – the “Goldstone Report.”

What did the supposedly antiwar man of peace who had just ascended to the highest war-making office on Earth have to say about these outrages? The Palestinians and their many supporters in the Middle East and around the world watched in disgust as the famously wordy President-Elect stood curiously mute in relation to Israel’s dreadful massacre of civilians. Obama claimed that “institutional constraints” prevented him from commenting on “the Gaza War.” The US can only have “one president at a time,” Obama said.  Meanwhile, however, he gave regular proto-presidential speeches on the US economy and forthrightly condemned the terrible Islamic terrorist action that took place in Mumbai, India, in late November of 2008.  As Noam Chomsky noted at the time:

“To [Israel’s] crimes Obama’s response has been silence – unlike, say, the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, which he was quick to denounce, along with the ‘hateful ideology’ that lies behind it.  In the case of Gaza, his spokespersons hide behind the mantra that ‘there is one president at a time,’ and repeated his support for Israeli actions when he visited the Israeli town of Sderot in July [2008]: ‘If missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that.’ But he will do nothing, not even make a statement, when US jets and helicopters with Israeli pilots are causing incomparable worse suffering to Palestinian children (emphasis added).” (Noam Chomsky, “Elections 2008 and Obama’s Vision,” Z Magazine, February 2008)

Even worse, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh disclosed that US “smart bombs” and “other high-tech ordnance” used in the attack on Gaza were re-supplied after “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object.” (S. Hersh, “Syria Calling,” New Yorker, April 6, 2009).

“To Touch the Muslim Soul” (Cairo 2009)

Five months after his first Inauguration, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech “to touch the Muslim soul” in Cairo.  He called for Arab governments to “normalize” relations with Israel in accord with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative (API).  The call was transparently cynical, however, for it ignored key Israel action required by the plan. The API, approved by 22 Arab League nations, offered “normalization” only in exchange for Israel’s withdrawal to its pre-1967 borders, the sharing of Jerusalem between Israel and a new Palestinian state, a fair resolution of the  Palestinian refugee crisis in accord with international law, and more.  But so what? The freshly elected “new” top false man from Washington simply ignored Israel’s obligation under the initiative.  This was consistent with his deafening silence on Israel’s crimes against Gaza and with his deletion of Israel from his Inaugural Address call for leaders around the world “to unclench your fist.”

When the UN Goldstone report came out in September of 2009, the Obama White House used its power to bury the document, smearing it as (in the words of US UN Ambassador Susan Rice) “unbalanced” and “deeply flawed.”  Palestinian rights activist Sonja Karkar was later struck by how empty Obama’s promise of “change” already seemed to Palestinian people: “If you would only give us more than words.  Perhaps from where you stand, Mr. President, you don’t hear how hollow they sound…Yet, it is in that very same hollow space that more and more people can hear the keening sounds of silence from Gaza and the rapidly fading echoes of your ‘Yes we can.’” (“Letter to Obama,” ZNet, October 13, 2009)

The US fist has hardly unclenched under Obama. He may have been tasked with winding down Washington’s failed ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (the same job would have fallen to a President McCain), but he has drastically expanded the scale, intensity, and scope of US drone warfare (the killer of 951 civilians in Pakistan alone under Obama) and the presence of US Special Forces troops around the world. Obama kept the US imperial “machine set on kill” (Allan Nairn).

“Nothing More Shameful Than Attacking Sleeping Children”

During the most recent “Gaza fighting” (“mainstream” US media’s deceptive term for Israel’s latest one-sided and mass-murderous assault on the Gaza prison strip), Israel has killed more than 1900 Palestinians, 70 percent of them civilians, including hundreds of children. Israel’s crimes have again included the bombing and shelling of schools, hospitals, ambulances, and UN shelters. Gaza’s main power plant was bombed (as usual), “sharply curtailing the already very limited electricity and worse yet, reducing still further the minimal availability of fresh water” (Noam Chomsky). The openly criminal savagery has occurred in full view of the world, most of which is appalled by the vicious, even sociopathic carnage inflicted on the defenseless and trapped people of Gaza by the “Most Moral Army in the World”: US planes, tanks, and helicopters with Israeli pilots and commanders.

Israel is creating a “no man’s land” in Gaza, shrinking the outdoor prison by more than 40 percent. The Daily Beast’s Jesse Rosenfeld reports that

“This narrow strip of land that used to be called ‘the Gaza Strip,’ already one of the more densely populated places on Earth, is growing dramatically smaller. The Israeli military, relentlessly and methodically, is driving people out of the 3-kilometer (1.8 miles) buffer zone it says it needs to protect against Hamas rockets and tunnels. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the buffer zone eats up about 44 percent of Gaza’s territory… Apartment blocks are fields of rubble, and as I move through this hostile landscape the phrase that keeps ringing in my head is ‘scorched earth.’” (“Israel Creates ‘No Man’s Land in Gaza,” Daily Beast, July 28, 2014).

“The world stands disgraced” – so said United Nations Relief and Works Agency Commission-General Pierre Kraehenbuehl after Tel Aviv bombed a UN shelter filled with more than 3000 refugees on July 30th. Many of the 16 killed were women and children. The usually restrained Secretary-General of the UN Ban Ki-moon has condemned Israel’s latest sociopathic attack on Gaza “in the strongest possible terms…Nothing,” the Secretary-General added, “is more shameful than attacking sleeping children.” Ban Ki-moon noted that the precise location of this school had been communicated to the Israeli military authorities 17 times.

Unfelt Sorrow: No Honest Broker

Thanks to publicly available images of open Israeli state crimes that have shocked the world, including many in the US, Obama has had to make sounds of humanitarian concern this time. At an August 1st press conference, Obama said it was “heartbreaking to see what’s happening in Gaza.”  He said he “want[ed] to see everything possible done to ensure Palestinian civilians aren’t killed.”   A White House spokesperson said “We are extremely concerned that thousands of internally displaced Palestinians who have been called on by the Israeli military to evacuate their homes are not safe in UN-designated shelters in Gaza.”

These and other US “condemnations” of some of Israel’s more egregious war crimes against Palestinian humanity would seem a bit more genuine if they didn’t come at the same time as the Administration directs the Pentagon to release more weaponry to Israel. And if they weren’t accompanied by the usual US statements of sympathy for Israelis (who have lost a grand total of three civilians in the latest “Gaza fighting”) combined with the customary claims that Hamas is largely responsible for Palestinian civilians deaths, the standard sham expressions of distress for Palestinians “caught in the crossfire,” and the regular strong backing for Israel’s “right to defend itself.”  What crossfire? Where? And of course, as far as the US is concerned, “Palestinians…have no right to defend themselves, surely not when Israel is on good behavior, keeping to the norm of quiet-for-quiet: stealing their land, driving them out of their homes, subjecting them to a savage siege, and regularly attacking them with weapons provided by their protector….Palestinians,” Noam Chomsky notes, “are like black Africans, the Namibian refugees in the Cassinga camp for example, all terrorists for whom the right of defense does not exist.”  (Noam Chomsky, “Outrage,” ZNet, August 2, 2014)

The Administration’s expressions of worry for Palestinian lives are right out of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “False face,” the great playwright noted, “must hide what the false heart doth know.” (Macbeth, 1.7.83) “To show an unfelt sorrow,” Shakespeare added “is an office Which the false man does easy” (Macbeth, 2.3.136-37).

Obama is not naïve or stupid.  He knows very well that the US is actively helping Israel in its racist and sociopathic war on Gaza by: sharing raw signals intelligence with the Israeli military; “continually replenishing Israel’s ammunition; diplomatically supporting Israel’s economic blockade of Gaza; exporting vast supplies of weapons and munitions and other military technology to Israel each year; opposing the designation of Palestine as a “nonmember observer state” in the UN (thereby preventing Palestinians from enlisting the International Criminal Court in its struggle against Israel’s theft of their land.  As Juan Cole notes, “The US cannot serve as an honest broker in Israel-Palestine negotiations because its government is overwhelming committed to and identified with Israel, including in this war. That is why President Obama keeps mouthing propaganda like that Israel has a right to defend itself (it doesn’t enjoy an absolute right of that sort– its defense has to be proportionate and within international law).” (J. Cole, “Top 5 Ways US is Israel’s Accomplice in War Crimes in Gaza,” Informed Comment, August 4, 2014).

Nothing is more shameful than attacking sleeping children – nothing except perhaps giving others ordnance, weapons, and intelligence data with which to attack sleeping children and providing blank check diplomatic and political cover for the murderers and acting throughout like you’ve got nothing to do with the horror.

Marrowless Men: “Look Man, I’m a Politician”

Shakespeare again: “Thy bones are marrowless, thy blood is cold.” (Macbeth, 3.4.93). The condemnation applies not just to Obama but to almost the entirety of the US elite political class and imperial establishment, most of which is deeply committed and captive to the savage racist and sociopathic occupation and mass-murder state Israel has become.  A recent Daily Beast article is titled “Even Left-Wing Democrats Can’t Quit Israel.”   Reporter Tim Mak notes that:

“Despite grassroots outrage at Operation Protective Edge, left-wing members of the House and Senate won’t criticize Israel’s ongoing incursion into Gaza. Much of the American left is critical of Israel, particularly since its incursion into Gaza. But in the halls of Congress, even progressive Democrats beloved by grassroots activists are loath to criticize the Jewish State’s ongoing military offensive.”

“A Pew Research Center poll released Monday showed that a plurality of Democrats across the country, 35 percent, and liberals, 44 percent, said that Israel had ‘gone too far’ in its response to its conflict with Hamas. Meanwhile, 47 percent of Democrats told Gallup that Israel’s actions during the current conflict were “unjustified…But these opinions are nearly impossible to find in Congress. Democrats, when asked a question about Israeli operations in Gaza, had two standard responses: irritation, or else a statement of their broad support of Israel, without going into specifics. It was as if the very mention of Israel turned the question into a hostile interview.”

“ ‘Look, man, I’m a politician, with multiple constituencies. Why should I alienate one just so that you can write a story?’ Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison angrily told The Daily Beast. Ellison, a stalwart progressive, was the first Muslim-American elected to Congress.”

“Ellison cited a Tuesday op-ed he had written that was critical of the Gaza blockade, but became noticeably agitated when asked to expand on his views. In particular, he did not want to address whether Israel had gone too far during its current operations in the Gaza Strip.”

“Sen. Bernie Sanders, a darling of the left who identifies as a democratic socialist, was curt. His tone changed suddenly when the topic shifted from the Veterans Administration bill that he had been shepherding through Congress to Israel’s operation in Gaza.”

“ ‘That’s not where my mind is right now,” he told the Beast.”(T. Mak, Daily Beast, July 30, 2014)

This is yet another reminder to seriously progressive citizens never to look for “leadership,” moral or otherwise, from politicians. Howard Zinn would have appreciated Rep. Ellison’s remark. “Except for the rare few,” Zinn noted seven years ago, “our representatives are politicians, and will surrender their integrity, claiming to be ‘realistic.’ We are not politicians, but citizens. We have no office to hold on to, only our consciences, which insist on telling the truth. That, history suggests, is the most realistic thing a citizen can do” (H. Zinn, “Are We Politicians or Citizens?” The Progressive, May 2007).

Source: Counterpunch.org