The body of 8-month-old Laila Anwar, who died of tear gas inhalation, was held by her mother at a hospital in the Gaza Strip on Tuesday
Satirical news site News Thump recently published an article where they ‘quoted’ Israeli PM Netanyahu on yesterday’s massacre of 62 unarmed Palestinians by Israeli soldiers:
Netanyahu has defended his armed forces and their tactics, accusing Palestinians of working together to jump in front of any random sniper’s bullets that happened to be in their vicinity.
Netanyahu told reporters,
“These people could have avoided the thousands of high-velocity bullets sent in their general direction if they had wanted to.
“But no, their primary goal was to make Israel look like a bully on the international stage, so they took every opportunity they could to throw themselves in front of bullets that would have otherwise fallen harmlessly into the ground.
“And those dead children were probably thrown in front of bullets by their parents.”
The article has been liked 339,000 times on Facebook, and as far as I can tell, few if any realized that the article comes from a satirical site and that Netanyahu did not publicly say those words, or anything like them. But then that’s not exactly surprising, because Netanyahu could easily have said those words, and there’s little doubt he – and many other members of the Israeli political and military elite – thought them.
On the night of July 20th 2014, the Israeli military shelled the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shuja’iyeh, killing 63 people, 17 children among them. In an attempt to justify that massacre, Netanyahu said at the time:
“We have to protect ourselves. We try to target the rocketeers, we do. And all civilian casualties are not intended by us but actually intended by Hamas who want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said they use telegenically dead Palestinians for the cause. They want the more dead the better.”
The words are different from News Thump’s satirical take, but the message is the same. Palestinian leaders and authorities ‘make’ Israel kill Palestinian civilians because they want to make Israel look bad (“for the cause”). Many parallels could be drawn with Netanyahu’s statement, for example, the rapist who accuses his victim of ‘making him do it’ or ‘asking for it’; the psychologically deranged murderer who claims that he killed prostitutes ‘to save them’ from a cruel world. When it raises its ugly head in civil society, this kind of twisted psychopathic thinking provokes revulsion and is universally condemned, yet when Netanyahu employs it in relation to the massacring of Gazans, it’s accepted as a reasonable argument that absolves him and his shock troops.
In spewing such pathological musings on the value of Palestinians life, Netanyahu is merely echoing the equally psychopathic thoughts of former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who in the 1960s attempted to justify Israeli murder of Palestinian children by saying essentially the same thing:
“When peace comes, we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. Peace will come when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.” – Golda Meir
The problem with Israel isn’t merely that it is an Apartheid state where Palestinians (both in Israel and in the occupied territories) are treated as second class citizens; there have been (and are) many nations around the world that brutally treat a section of their population. The real problem with Israel is the image it presents of itself as a little slice of the ‘West’ in the Middle East surrounded by hoards of atavistic Arabs baying for Jewish blood and against whom Israel is fighting, on behalf of the people of Western nations, in the supposed ‘clash of civilizations’.
The problem is not only that this image is entirely false, but in manipulating Western citizens into accepting this false image as true, the state of Israel makes Western citizens accomplices in the slaughter of innocent civilians, children included. This is the real problem of Israel for the people of the world, and in particular the people of Western nations who are very much the primary target of this attempt to, essentially, subvert their souls, or at least their humanity.
Israel’s ongoing attack on the people of Gaza represents a choice (albeit a weighted one) for the people of this planet. A gun is being held (figuratively and literally) to the head of a small child, and the question being put to the ‘civilized’ West is:
‘Is there ANY situation under which it is appropriate to pull the trigger?’
Too many people are allowing themselves to be manipulated by the despicable lies and manipulations of psychopaths in positions of power to answer ‘yes’. In doing so, they are pushing us all, as a global society, closer to the brink (and perhaps over the edge) of complete moral bankruptcy. The history of human civilizations is littered with, not only the stories, but the actual ruins of civilizations that provoked devastating catastrophes because they lost their connection to their own humanity.
