I Heard the News Today, Oy Vey

Historian Gabriel Kolko has written about the trend of the “democratization of arms” throughout the world and, personally, I can’t wait for it to happen. During Israel’s January 2009 “Cast Lead” massacre of Gaza, I thought that Hamas might have some of the same weaponry that Hezbollah successfully used on Israel in 2006, but it was not to be. But with Israel’s latest massacre, operation “Pillar of Gelfite” (or some such shit), it looks like Hamas now has some decent weaponry in Iranian-made Farj-5 rockets that can hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

There’s much speculation about why Israel pulled back from a ground invasion, ended the massacre after “only” eight days and then got nothing it wanted in the cease fire agreement — except that it would cease being fired on. Israel didn’t even succeed in destroying Hamas’ rocket stockpile because Hamas fired rockets right up until the cease fire announcement — and fired them deep into Israel. It seems like the quantity and quality of these rockets cut short the Israel massacre party from 22 days and 1400 deaths in 2009 to eight days and 170 deaths ten days ago. Unlike 2009, I’m not sure if Israelis in the border hills even had time to get out their lawn chairs and enjoy the Gaza festivities (people running, screaming, bleeding, crushed under rubble, etc.)

This is good news about the Palestinians’ long range rockets. There can never be peace before justice, especially while one side is “negotiating” at the edge of obliteration. This was a Farj-5 Thanksgiving, the indigenous people fighting back, and we can give thanks because this might be the early stirrings of deterrence to future Israeli aggression. One day the Gaza resistance will have 60,000 rockets just like Hezbollah and be able to strike anywhere in Israel. Overall, the Zionist soap opera ain’t over till the Fat Man (or Little Boy) of Iran (or some other Muslim nation) is poised to sing but never actually does. It’s called Mutual Assured Destruction and it’s worked for the USA and Russia for decades. And I didn’t bring Hiroshima and Nagasaki into this — this guy did.

Hating Israel isn’t quite as good as hating America but it will do in a pinch. Any given week Israel can be counted on to deliver the goods: build a “Museum of Tolerance” on the cemetery of a dispossessed people here, murder humanitarian aid workers in international waters there. Drop 90,000 unexploded cluster bombs on Lebanon in 2006 in the final 72 hours of the conflict when the terms of the cease fire had already been set. Run over Rachel Corrie with a bulldozer (twice) as she tried to stop the demolition of a Palestinian home. But what do you care, Israel, about the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg Principles — what on earth do they have to do with you and the purification of your Jews-only state, your “superiority” over the Palestinian Untermenschen, your separation walls and highways, your decades-long vivisection of the land and people of Palestine and your thirty discriminatory citizenship and property ownership laws — so very September 15, 1935 (The Reich Citizenship Law.) Should the world really be surprised that so many of your supporters decide to identify with the abusers and become abusers themselves instead of identifying with the victims and sticking up for the weak and helpless?

During every Israeli massacre the reporting and commentary is worse than usual: in every article a Palestinian life has all the value of a paper clip and we are implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) encouraged to identify with Israel. It’s as if to tell the tiniest truths about what Israel does to Palestinians would bring the whole house of cards collapsing down to the 1948 foundation. Every atrocity must be explained and justified, every person standing up for the Palestinians must be vilified.

The one article that I thought showed some fairness told of a Palestinian-American woman visiting her parents in Gaza just before Israel’s onslaught. The woman was torn between wanting to stay with her parents or returning to her husband and children in America, and her parents urging her to leave. Had she been a correct ethnicity, Hollywood would have turned this into a kind of “Sophie’s Choice.” The comments section was filled with the most hateful hasbara filth anyone can imagine, wholly lacking any empathy or compassion, aimed totally at destroying the mind of this woman whom I‘m sure is quite stronger than her attackers. These tribalist genociders have removed themselves from humanity.

I’ve never paid much attention to J Street but after the cease fire I  stumbled onto their blog and I was not impressed. I think I did figure out what the “J” stands for, though: Janus — because while it’s presented to us as the anti-AIPAC, and is pretending to look in a different direction, its head is still attached to Jewish tribalism.

So in the November 12 blog post, J-anus accuses Palestinians of “provoking” Israel, knowing full well that Israel’s blockade is an act of war, Palestinian resistance is legal under international law and that Israel, as the occupying power, is supposed to provide for the welfare of the occupied, not starve them and strafe their refugee camps with F-16s.

The November 15 blog post finds J Street unable to say that Israel actually kills people, saying there are “reported fatalities among Palestinian civilians, with many wounded as well.” Contrasted with: “Hundreds of rockets have been launched from Gaza, killing and injuring several Israelis.” In the American media, Israel never actually kills anybody — you never read simple clear sentences like: “Israel killed twenty Palestinians today.” Palestinians die of bullets and bombs but Israel never kills them in print. Palestinians die of vagueness. They die of unexamined and unexplained causes and, in this Impressionistic “journalism,” it’s frequently suggested that it’s of their own hand, or as if bombs were snowflakes that the Weather Nazis drop on them, just acts of nature that no one (especially the Great Satan) has any responsibility for or could possibly control. J Street says Hamas must “immediately cease rocket attacks on Israel” while urging the IDF to continue, to “exercise judicious restraint in limiting its response to military targets.” Where exactly were the military targets in the Warsaw Ghetto in relation to the civilian populace, J Street? Oh, who cares… And the IDF gets to keep on firing, avers J Street, because… well, there’s no explanation, it must be that they’re simply the chosen army! Practice, J Street, practice: Israel killed 170 Palestinians in eight days, Israel killed 170 human beings — men, women and children — in eight days. You can speak the truth — it won’t kill you. Actually, maybe it will kill you and your funding. Best to be a good J-erman and shut up.

Then there’s the Nov. 23 CNN op-ed of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Republican-Har Homa.) A turkey gobbles but Cantor goebbels. Every sentence is a cross between a hoot and an abomination, starting with Cantor saying how glad “we” are that there’s a cease fire. Every word thereafter shows his palpable disappointment that Gaza was not more thoroughly obliterated ala “Cast Lead,” particularly that there was no ground “operation.” US politicians are always willing to shed vats of American blood for the sake of Israel so they’re totally frustrated when Israeli generals and politicians won’t shed IDF blood. Apparently, IDF soldiers aren’t quite as meaningless to Israeli politicians as American soldiers are to American politicians. (The America ruling class was furious that Hezbollah defeated Israel in the summer of 2006, and America is wrecking the whole Middle East, from Syria to Iran, to eventually re-ignite civil war in Lebanon and destroy Hezbollah. There must be no successful examples of working class resistance anywhere in the world — Cuba, Hezbollah, Sandinistas, FARC — and this American obsession joins with Israel’s desire to steal Lebanese land up to the Litani River resource — racist genociding apparently is very dehydrating.)

The congressman really goes off the rails when he chastises the Prime Minister of Turkey for calling Israel a “terrorist state.” Instead, says Rep. Cant(or), “Israelis look fondly upon Turkey and its people, and they desire a better relationship.” Earth to psychopath, earth to psychopath, come in, congressman, do you copy: Remember those eight Turkish humanitarian relief workers on the Mavi Marmara ship that Israeli commandos executed in cold blood and the 60 others they wounded on May 31, 2010? Sorry that Israel is feeling rebuffed, but countries can only stand so much Israeli “fondness.”

(Israel also murdered an American national, 19-year-old Furkan Dogan, who was shot point blank in the face, and in the back of the head for good measure, something that the self-described “President of all Americans,” Barack Obama, didn’t think worthy of commenting on, much less retaliating against. It won’t matter to obombazombies but Obama’s always worse, year after year: he was silent during the 2009 Gaza massacre but this time he gave full-throated approval, giving us the brazenly hypocritical psychopathic punch line to his presidencies: “There’s no country on earth that would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.” Except for the missiles that he rains down Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc. By Obama’s reasoning these countries should be bombing Washington, DC and New York City… er, wait a minute…)

But here’s what I really unlike you for, Rep. Cantor: you condemn Qatar’s offer of $400 million to rebuild Gaza which you refer to as a “terrorist rump state.” America and Israel have done everything in their colossal powers to deny the people of Gaza their democracy, their choice of Hamas in a free and fair election. With the full might of American money, armaments and diplomatic cover behind it, Israel has used Palestinian civilians as human shields, bombed hospitals and schools and UN food warehouses, dropped white phosphorous on heavily populated areas in 2009 and made sure that Gaza never develops, never has a day’s peace, never has enough drinking water or electricity or enough to eat. And you spit on them as a “rump state” when you helped make them that way and keep them that way. You’re a depraved racist monster, choir boy, a hideous propagandist for nonstop war against Muslims the world over. Fuck you and the Israel-first AIPAC money you rode in on.

For fair and balanced reporting, every news article about Israel should either begin or end with a paragraph like this: “Israel is a land and water stealing racist genocider who despicably uses the Nazi Holocaust to silence criticism of its own daily violations of the Geneva Conventions and international law against an impoverished but heroic people. From its  brutal terrorist ‘founding,’ Israel has broken every agreement with the indigenous people it has stolen from, driven off and killed — in the example of its mentor, the United States of America. These two deeply racist nations were the last supporters of apartheid South Africa — it’s who they still are. Israel’s long-standing goal and overriding purpose is to exterminate every Palestinian from Palestine.”

Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com.

Randy Shields can be reached at music2hi4thehumanear@gmail.com. His writings and art are collected at RandyShields.com.