I Despise Netanyahu. That Doesn't Make Me an Anti-Semite.

I hate terrorism. 

I hated the it when Assad ordered barrel bombs dropped on civilians in Aleppo. I hated it it when ISIS savagely overran the center of Iraq to establish a caliphate in the gaping wound they had created. I hate the murderous shenanigans of Boko Haram in west Africa. I hate terrorism but that doesn't make me an anti-Semite.

When water lines are broken. When sewage gathers in the streets. When there's no electricity to power ventilators for Covid-patients. When those things happen it's not a targeted assault on an adversary. It's an assault on the civilian population. To me, that's terrorism. That's why we have outlawed it in the laws of warfare. It's a war crime. If it happens to be committed by some state that doesn't transform it into something else. It's terrorism. Whether that state is Assad's Syria or Netanyahu's Israel doesn't matter.

Now as these internally displaced persons, or IDPs, flock to school shelters, the UNRWA fears for the spread of Covid. Just 5 per cent of Gazans have been vaccinated because that's how little vaccine Israelis have allowed across the border. 

Israel contends it has no responsibility for the pandemic and the Palestinian plight but that's - a lie. Israel has gotten very good at claiming they're not an "occupying power" but they are. They have Gaza sealed off. Israelis don't have to live there. It's their prison. People there are born into captivity and many will die in captivity, a really hard fact our current leaders struggle to ignore.


Comments

  1. Every time something like this happens, Mound, the third rail in politics asserts itself, and little but platitudes are heard as the leaders in the West express a desire for cessation of hostilities on both sides. Even though such utterances wear thin, they seem to show no signs of cessation in this latest battle.

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    Replies
    1. I saw the John Oliver item you posted, Lorne. He's right. This isn't a matter of moral equivalence but then it never was. The worst part is that the principal abuser is our ostensible ally.

      Delete
  2. Most of the rest of the world seems to understand what's happening whenever Bibi and the boys set themselves to a periodic "mowing of the grass". Along with the US, we continue to give them an exemption on the war crimes issue. Meanwhile, we put the National Holocaust Monument in the National Capital Region in a place kitty-cornered from the Canadian War Museum. I've never seen it, but I understand from some who have visited it that you can't miss it.

    We've acknowledged on demand that there was one genocide that was like no other, whether of the past, the future or even the present. Don't question that. Are we talking about anything other than magnitude? Don't ask that question. The boys might say you're anti-Semitic.

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  3. To claim BDS supporters are anti-Semites is akin to saying all Afghanis are terrorists. The smear just suits Mr. Trudeau's disingenuous narrative.

    I came across a piece today questioning whether, when the influx of would-be climate migrants from Central America arrives at America's southern border whether the US will treat them much differently than Gazan Palestinians. Scary thought.

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  4. Been there, done that.
    I attended a Gwyn Dyer book promotion at the Vancouver island university some years ago.
    At the time I thought he was out to lunch and in need of of a new leather jacket!!

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK5l_0bm6ko

    I was never so wrong in my life.

    There are visionaries amongst us.

    TB


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    Replies
    1. More an oracle than a visionary, TB. I bought Climate Wars, 'loaned' it to someone, wound up having to buy the second edition.

      After Climate Wars Dwyer had a change of heart and wrote an apologia in which he suggested maybe we still can turn it all around. Maybe we won't violate the point of no return. We might not trigger runaway climate catastrophe. I suspect he didn't want to imagine the fate that might await his kids and theirs.

      Dyer has now moved beyond the climate crisis into the perils of robotics, automation and the future of work in "Growing Pains: the Future of Work."

      "Dyer examines the global challenges facing us all today and explains how they have contributed to a world of inequality, poverty, and joblessness — conditions which he argues inevitably lead to the rise of populism. The greatest threat to social and political stability, he argues, lies in the rise of automation, which will continue to eliminate jobs, whether politicians admit that it is happening or not. To avoid a social and political catastrophe, we will have to find ways of putting real money into the pockets of those who have no work.

      "But this is not a book without hope. Our capacity for overcoming the worst has been tested again and again throughout history, and we have always survived. To do so now, Dyer argues, we must embrace radical solutions to the real difficulties facing individuals, or find ourselves back in the 1930s with no way out."

      Delete
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