For Whom the Gaza Bell Tolls
“The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.”
I sometimes think that it’s pointless for Americans to talk much about recent events in Gaza because we know how it will play out — America will do absolutely nothing to interfere with the ongoing massacre.
British journalist Robert Fisk reminds us of the drill:
So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms.” But why should we be surprised?
Have we forgotten the 17,500 dead — almost all civilians, most of them children and women — in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon; the 1,700 Palestinian civilian dead in the Sabra-Chatila massacre; the 1996 Qana massacre of 106 Lebanese civilian refugees, more than half of them children, at a UN base; the massacre of the Marwahin refugees who were ordered from their homes by the Israelis in 2006 then slaughtered by an Israeli helicopter crew; the 1,000 dead of that same 2006 bombardment and Lebanese invasion, almost all of them civilians?
This time around, Israel shows not the slightest compunction about brazenly massacring an imprisoned population in front of the world. But why should they? They know no real opposition will arise from power centers anywhere on earth. And they continue to have America — Republicans, Democrats, Christian Zionists and almost everybody else — in their thrall. In large part, this is due to what Israel Shamir wrote with respect to Jewish financial mischief: ”The rich Jews buy media so it will cover up their (and their brethren’s) misdeeds.”
James Petras also weighed in on Israel’s ongoing war against the Palestinians, writing, “Israel’s sustained and comprehensive bombing campaign of every aspect of governance, civic institutions and society is directed toward destroying civilized life in Gaza.” Echoing Shamir, Petras noted that Israel’s attempt to “purge Palestine of its Arab population” continues without apology because “The Israeli totalitarian leaders knew with confidence that they could act and they could kill with impunity, locally and before the entire world, because of the influence of the US Zionist Power Configuration in and over the US White House and Congress.”
Another voice that showed exasperation with Israel’s actions was that of Taki Theodoracopulos, who wrote, “Israel can now safely be called the Bernie Madoff of countries, as it has lied to the world about its intentions, stolen Palestinian lands continuously since 1948, and managed to do all this with American tax payer’s money.”
Perhaps no one, however, is more morally outraged than former Reagan administration official Paul Craig Roberts, who wrote on VDARE:
Caterpillar Tractor makes a special bulldozer for Israel that is designed to knock down Palestinian homes and to uproot their orchards. In 2003 an American protester, Rachel Corrie, stood in front of one of these Caterpillars and was run over and crushed.
Nothing happened. The Israelis can kill whomever they want whenever they want.
They have been doing so for 60 years, and they show no sign of stopping.
Roberts continued, “While the rest of the world condemns Israel’s inhumanity, the US Congress — I should say the US Knesset — rushed to endorse the Israeli slaughter of the Palestinians in Gaza.” How pervasive was this endorsement? “The US Senate endorsed Israel’s massacre of Palestinians with a vote of 100-0. The US House of Representatives voted 430-5 to endorse Israel’s massacre of Palestinians. . . .” (See here for further details.)
Readers who have followed Roberts in the post-9-11 period know that he has been a persistent critic of Israel’s influence over President Bush and the Congress. He has not changed his position with respect to Gaza either: “The US Congress was proud to show that it is Israel’s puppet even when it comes to murdering women and children. The President of the United States was proud to block effective action by the UN Security Council by ordering the Secretary of State to abstain.”
Two days later, Roberts added to his critique, displaying how fully Bush is a puppet to an Israeli master:
“Early Friday morning the secretary of state was considering bringing the cease-fire resolution to a UN [Security Council] vote and we didn’t want her to vote for it,” Olmert said. “I said ‘get President Bush on the phone.’ They tried and told me he was in the middle of a lecture in Philadelphia. I said ‘I’m not interested, I need to speak to him now.’ He got down from the podium, went out and took the phone call.” [PM: Rice left embarrassed in UN vote, By Yaakov Lappin , Jerusalem Post, January 12, 2009].
Roberts then turned to a friend’s comments to summarize this exchange:
“Let me see if I understand this,” wrote a friend in response to news reports that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert ordered President Bush from the podium where he was giving a speech to receive Israel’s instructions about how the United States had to vote on the UN resolution. “On September 11th, President Bush is interrupted while reading a story to school children and told the World Trade Center had been hit — and he went on reading. Now, Olmert calls about a UN resolution when Bush is giving a speech and Bush leaves the stage to take the call. There exists no greater example of a master-servant relationship.”
Aptly, Roberts concluded, “In his final press conference, President Bush, deluded to the very end, said that the whole world respects America. In fact, when the world looks at America, what it sees is an Israeli colony.”
And the behavior of America’s master is none too pleasant, as retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski recently made clear:
One needs only to look at the death toll (one-sided), the difference in military capacities between Israel and Gaza (shocking) and the kind of arsenals employed by both sides to determine what is happening. We’ve seen it on the elementary school playground, but this version is played out with incredible destructive force, no supervision, no brave friends, and no justice.
Not only is incredible destructive force in view for the whole world, a bizarre Israeli response to the slaughter has surfaced: It is the “ultimate spectator sport,” in the words of a London Times reporter.
As a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal also described, from hilltops overlooking Gaza, Israelis would come with lawn chairs and picnics lunches to watch the one-sided death circus that is Gaza. Israelis “have made the trek, they say, to witness firsthand a military operation—so far, widely popular inside Israel—against Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, four teenagers sat on a hill near Mr. Danino’s, oohing and aahing at the airstrikes. Nadav Zebari, who studies Torah in Jerusalem, was eating a cheese sandwich and sipping a Diet Coke.”
Levinson took quotes from observers: “I’ve never watched a war before,” one said. Meanwhile, a group of Israeli police officers took turns snapping pictures of one another with smoking Gaza as a backdrop. “I want to feel a part of the war,” was one comment.
“On another hilltop overlooking Gaza,” Levinson continued, “Sandra Koubi, a 43-year-old philosophy student, says seeing the violence up close ‘is a kind of catharsis for me, to get rid of all the anxiety we have inside us after years of rocket fire’ from Hamas.”
Perhaps most pointedly comes the testimony of one Jocelyn Znaty, “a stout 60-year-old nurse for Magen David Adom, the Israeli counterpart of the Red Cross,” who could “hardly contain her glee at the site of exploding mortars below in Gaza.” “Look at that,” she shouts, clapping her hands as four artillery rounds pound the territory in quick succession. “Bravo! Bravo!” . . . I am sorry, but I am happy.”
Pavel Wolberg/European Pressphoto Agency
Orthodox Jews watched smoke rise over the northern Gaza Strip Tuesday.
Roberts, like Taki and others, put much of the blame for such a spectacle clearly on the shoulders of the American public. “What is happening to the Palestinians herded into the Gaza Ghetto is happening because of American money and weapons. It is just as much an attack by the United States as an attack by Israel. The US government is complicit in the war crimes.”
Repeating charges he has made consistently for years, Roberts laments the fact that “’Our’ president was a puppet for a cabal led by Dick Cheney and a handful of Jewish neoconservatives, who took control of the Pentagon, the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, and ‘Homeland Security.’ From these power positions, the neocon cabal used lies and deception to invade Afghanistan and Iraq, pointless wars that have cost Americans $3 trillion, while millions of Americans lose their jobs, their pensions, and their access to health care.”
While Roberts et al. may be right that each and every American taxpayer bears some responsibility for the carnage in Gaza, the fact is that most Americans are tired of violence in the far-away Middle East. Besides, the economy is in the tank, the NFL playoffs are in progress, and the kids have to go back to school. Everyday life takes priority for most Americans.
Unfortunately, such short-sightedness will not do, for the pitiful denizens of Gaza are not the last targets of the Israeli army or the worldwide network of Diaspora Jews. The dispossession of the Palestinians since 1948 is but a dress rehearsal for more ambitious dispossessions of non-Jews throughout the world.
Do I exaggerate? I believe that we have to take Israel Shamir seriously when he writes in Cabbala of Power. “Palestine is not the ultimate goal of the Jews; the world is. Palestine is just the place for the world state headquarters.”
Shamir has made a fascinating study of the two thousand-year struggle between Jews and non-Jews, particularly Christians. His arguments are far too subtle to summarize here, so interested parties should consult the above-mentioned book as well as his more recent work, Masters of Discourse. I will simply cherry pick some of his more striking ideas.
Shamir — an immigrant from Russia to Israel — holds a low opinion of his fellow Jews in the Holy Land. “Israelis are the riffraff of World Jewry, sent to conquer the land for the NWO HQ.” This process is revealed in a parable of the “Messiah’s Donkey” often used by religious Jews. This is a story in which disposable secular Jews (the donkey) are used by religious Jews to attain religious, messianic goals. “In plain words, spirit always wins over matter; the way of the Messiah of Spirit is to use the Donkey of Matter.”
“The Jews” — Shamir makes a distinction between organized Jewry and individual Jews — “intend to turn Jerusalem into the supreme capital of the world, and its rebuilt temple into the focal point of the Spirit on Earth.” Should they succeed, unspeakable despair will follow. “Christianity will die, the spirit will depart from the nations in our part of the world, and our present dubious democracy will be supplanted by a vast theocratic state. . . . De-spiritualized and uprooted, homeless and lonely, yesterday’s Masters of the World [non-Jews] will become slaves in all but name.”
Shamir sees a two-pronged approach to this quest for world domination, Zionism and Mammonite Liberalism. “While Zionism establishes the basis for the NWO HQ, the Mammonite Liberalism establishes the world-wide slavery. Jabotinsky and Soros are doing different tasks for one system; the Iron Wall and the Open Society are just different names for the same thing.”
Shamir’s analysis is eerily close to the Dispossessed Majority thesis of Wilmot Robertson, albeit cloaked in theological garb. Robertson described how in the 1960s and 70s white American Christians “had become a people of little or no account in their own country.” This was not an accident.
In my next column, I will expand on this argument.