The Times Makes Light of Desperation

The [N]ew York Times continued it’s truly vile reporting on Gaza with an article by Steven Erlanger which began by stating that Egypt had moved to “restore” its border with Gaza after “Palestinians used a bulldozer to knock down another portion of the wall, originally built by Israel just inside Gaza, to continue their shopping spree.”

Shopping spree??? SHOPPING SPREE??? Is that what Erlanger thinks you do when you are starving? Are we to suppose that Erlanger would characterize 12 year old “ghetto rats” who “breached” the “security barrier” around the “Jew-Enclave” of Warsaw as going on a “shopping spree” for potatoes? Oh... I forgot...those shoppers were Innocent Jews, these untermenschen are filthy Arabs.

Actually there is no difference. Cutting off heat in the winter, cutting off electricity and water, restricting medical supplies and reducing food rations to just above starvation is a crime against humanity -- any humanity -- and that includes anyone. Period. Erlanger’s quip about “shopping spree” was just the sort of cynical, contemptuous, humour one might have expected from the moral cadavers that ran the concentration camps.

Let’s get certain facts straight. Facts that even the Spew York Times can’t quite bury. As commented on this blog in October, the initial “sealing off” of Gaza did not just involve electricity blackouts but extended to food. Even innocent Israel didn’t deny it, proving its magnanimity by saying it would “allow in the minimum amount of food and medicines necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis”

Avoid a crisis? How many calories does that require? 2,000? 1600 Non-German Rations? A “Jew Ration” of 800? It’s all so deja jew -- aint that right Stevie?

The US press, which gives comfortable berth to scrivner punks like Erlanger, has consistently sought to sanitize Israel’s crimes under international law and has become a mere fart horn for the Israeli Thug State. It glosses over Israel’s illegal acts, it consistently harps (in misleadingly vague terms) about so-called “missle attacks on Israel” and routinely refers to the blockade of Gaza as involving mere “power cuts”. Typically enough Erlanger’s spew talked about “the economic squeeze on Hamas, which intensified last week when Israel decided to cut off shipments into Gaza, including fuel for the local power plant, in response to rocket attacks from Gaza.” Ah.... well then... it’s not so bad... It’s just an “economic squeeze” on "Hamas" in an ever so restrained response against TERRORIST ROCKET attacks on Israel.

The whole world except the spew fed chicken-public in the US understands that Israel is seeking to “degrade” the quality of life of Gazans to sub-basic levels.

As reported by the Guardian “Gaza goes hungry as Israeli sanctions bite”

“http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,2189543,00.html

“According to a World Bank report issued last month: "Gaza's economic backbone and private sector vitality risks collapse if the current situation ... continues." The report states that 90% of Gaza's industrial production has ceased and agricultural output has fallen by 50% in 2007

“The Israeli sanctions are affecting every level of Gazan society. Farmers have been particularly hard hit as they have been barred from exporting their products and denied pesticides and fertiliser by Israel, which makes it impossible to plant for next year

“Spare parts for water pumps and other equipment are also barred

“It is reducing the amount of food going into Gaza every week as it tries to exert more pressure on the population to bring about political change.”

Let me repeat that for thug pimps like Erlanger... Thug Staat Israel is:

REDUCING THE AMOUNT OF FOOD .... in order to EXERT MORE PRESSURE ON THE POPULATION. ....

In order for “pressure” to work it has to hurt. After all, no one was pressured into making concessions by baskets of brioche. And when reduced amounts of food “hurt” we call it hunger and starvation. In other words, Israel is engaged in precisely what international forbids: the collective starving of civilians in order to get them to surrender, or otherwise do what you want. It’s kinda like “area bombing”.

Back last Fall, the International Herald Tribune reported:

"The international aid group Oxfam International has warned that 225,000 Gazans could soon suffer from inadequate water supplies because of the fuel shortage, raising concerns for public health.

"With exports and most imports halted, factories have closed, construction has halted and store shelves are empty. Government officials believe the poverty rate has jumped to 75 percent, up from 65 percent from last summer."

http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=8618265

Let me repeat that for Spew York Times douchebags like Erlanger

SUFFER FROM INADEQUATE WATER SUPPLIES / STORE SHELVES ARE EMPTY

No doubt Erlanger, stuffed and slothed by post-war fats thinks that this refers to a run on truffles at Bloomies. Not.

Just this past week, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki Moon, condemned the crisis Israel had instigated in Gaza, stating that “If this situation endures, the closure will also cause further shortages of food, medical and relief items in the Gaza Strip,” He called on Israel to “refrain from actions that will harm the well-being of the general civilian population in Gaza.”

FURTHER SHORTAGES OF FOOD.... got that Steve?

As Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, insisted that Gazans were starving, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief, John Holmes, sounded the alarm about the impact of the closure of crossing points on the already “extremely worrying and fragile” humanitarian situation in Gaza. The crossings are “the lifeline for the delivery of humanitarian assistance and other goods into Gaza,” Holmes said, and the closure will result in even greater shortages of food items, medical goods, among other relief supplies and basic daily necessities.

But in what surely qualifies for a cameo scene in one of the genocide soaps Hollywood churns out, the Guardian reported that

“The Israeli army is micro-managing the sanctions to ensure that it cannot be accused of starving Gaza. In a daily communique to international organisations, the army proclaims: "No Humanitarian Crisis in the Gaza Strip - No Hunger in the Palestinian Territories", before it lists the number of days of food it estimates that Gaza has."

Ah yes:

Welcome to Theresienstadt, where you will be well cared for. There is no starvation in Theresienstadt. You will be well cared for... And everyone will receive FULL RATIONS , as decreed by the Reich Government!!

As the Guardian noted,

"But dry statistics hide thousands of stories of misery."

While the humanitarian Israeli Army is “managing” the situation to insure -- most critically -- that it can’t be accused of what it is doing to bring stomach pressure to bear, David Welch, one of the pieces of shit that have gotten stuck into the US Government, blamed the “border crossings” on Hamas’s `illegal actions in Gaza, their unwillingness to behave in a responsible manner.”

Wringing its hands and joining in the woe-fest, Israel's government said it was concerned that militants would use the breach in the border fence to bring arms and terrorists into Gaza. “We have real concerns that they can now freely smuggle explosives, missiles and people into Gaza, which makes an already bad situation even worse,'' Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Aryeh Mekel “Egypt should take care of the problem.''

The hypocrisy is beyond belief but not beyond outrage. Jesus forgave almost every sin... but hypocrisy infuriated even him.

Conflict and enmity are lamentable facts of human existence. That Jews and Arabs are at war in Palestine is one thing. But, if we have learned anything, in 2000 years of Christian Civilization it is that we can at least seek to mitigate the harm we inflict on civilians and avoid cruel and unusual punishments on even our enemies. Too often the restraint that distinguishes civilization from barbarism has been cast aside, as by Allied terror bombing of German cities and German ethnic cleansing of the so-called eastern territories. If there is a paradigm of what ought not to be done, it is the “rations reduction” of civilians trapped behind walled enclosures. If Israel doesn’t understand that then, it “has remembered everything and learned nothing.”

©WCG, 2008

http://cghs.dadeschools.net/ib_holocaust2001/Ghettoes/diet/diet.htm
http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/AxisRule1944-2.htm#Feeding
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Let Them Light Candles

AS reported by news media around the world, Israel decided several days ago to interrupt fuel and electricity supplies to Gaza in response to Hamas rocket attacks on Israel -- actually on the township of Sderot, 1 kilometer from the Gaza border. In view of the Palestinian attacks on innocent civilians, Israel’s intermittent power cut seemed to bespeak a super human patience and forbearance. Why God Himself could hardly be as mild in his judgements. Inconvenient? Well Let them light candles!

But there is always the “fine print”. Overlooked in all the blather about electricity cut offs was the following, courtesy of the New York Times:

"Israel said Sunday day that they had begun reducing fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip and had closed one of the two crossings through which food, medicine and other supplies pass into the area. ... As a result, only limited supplies of basic goods are allowed to enter the strip, and all exports of produce are prohibited. ...

"[According to a government spokesman,] the number of trucks of food and other goods entering Gaza will be reduced to roughly 55 trucks a day from 100 to 120, “We will allow in the minimum amount of food and medicines necessary to avoid a humanitarian crisis,” he said.”

A fifty percent reduction in food supplies? On a per-capita basis that boils down to a starvation diet. The “humanitarian crisis” Israel labors hard to avoid means what? The avoidance of “mass death”? But wait, what do starvation diets lead to?

Perhaps one could take a page from Raphael Lemkin’s seminal work “Axis Rule in Occupied Europe.” According to Lemkin, who coined the term, genocide operated on cultural, social, economic and biological levels. Lemkin writes:

“The destruction of the foundations of the economic existence of a national group necessarily brings about a crippling of its development, even a retrogression.”

The physical debilitation and even annihilation of national groups in occupied countries is carried out mainly in the following ways:

1. Racial Discrimination in Feeding. Rationing of food is organized according to racial principles throughout the occupied countries. "The German people come before all other peoples for food," declared Reich Minister Göring on October 4, 1942. In accordance with this program, the German population is getting 93 per cent of its pre-war diet, while those in the occupied territories receive much less: in Warsaw, for example, the Poles receive 66 per cent of the pre-war rations and the Jews only 20 per cent.

2. Endangering of Health. The undesired national groups, particularly in Poland, are deprived of elemental necessities for preserving health and life. This latter method consists, for example, of requisitioning warm clothing and blankets in the winter and withholding firewood and medicine. . . . Such measures, especially pernicious to the health of children, have caused the development of various diseases.

Lemkin’s schema of genocide has not been fully incorporated into international law. Nevertheless, it provides a cogent framework for analyzing genocidal policies from sociological and ethical perspectives. Cutting back on food deliveries in Gaza is strictly analogous to the General Gouvernement’s food “policies” in occupied Poland.

To argue that such measures are “reprisals” against a so-called barrage of rocket attacks on civilian Sderot is simply beside the point. International law prohibits indiscriminate reprisals. The whole purpose of the prohibition is precisely to put limits on the kinds and degrees of retaliation allowed. The limitations presuppose that there is something to retaliate over in the first place. To argue that the “right to retaliate” wipes away limits is simply to wipe away international law itself.

Precisely that kind of “they-started-it” argument was rejected at Nuremberg. The Nazi leveling of Lidice, in Czechoslovakia, was done in response to the unlawful, indisputably terrorist murder of Heydrich, the duly appointed administrator of those occupied territories. What made the Nazi response to that and other partisan acts of sabotage and murder a crime was not that retaliation was not allowed, but rather that the retaliation employed was excessive and indiscriminate, if not altogether an excuse to engage in counter-terror over and above deterrence and extermination over and above lawful reprisal.

Israel's trail of tu quoque’s can ultimately only lead back to the inceptional fact that European Zionists sought to colonize and invade a land that was not theirs by any genealogical or mythological stretch. That aside, the you started it gambit doesn’t work because the “its” are neither militarily nor morally equivalent.

Palestinians and Israelis are engaged in a conflict over land. But in this conflict, Israel -- among the world’s foremost military powers -- holds all the cards. It has control of Gaza’s borders. It has control of Gaza’s finances. It has control of Gaza’s air space. It has control of Gaza’s electricity and power. It has control of all entry and exit into Gaza. When democratic elections produced results Israel did not appreciate, it simply resorted to economic strangulation. No Indian Reservation was so controlled as Gaza whose only historical analog in recent memory are Lodz and Warsaw -- and, like Lodz and Warsaw , Gaza is one if not the most crowded places on earth. To claim some kind of moral equivalence from such state of inequality is simply perverted.

All animals will resist their capture and imprisonment. The human animal is no different. It is entirely natural that Palestinians, not wanting to live under Israeli domination, should resist. One should not expect otherwise . To self-righteously intone that they ought not to resist is to dress up in flimsy moral tissue a demand for abject and acquiescent submission.

Gazan resistance is in fact puny and pathetic. They cannot inflict any real damage on Israel. The facts bespeak the inequalities. According to Human Rights Watch, since 2005 there have been 2,700 Q’assam rocket attacks “into Israel”. The holocaustian horror conjured up by such a phrase qua headline is that of Jerusalem, O Jersualem recoiling under a barrage of missiles. Reading the usual zionist histrionics, one might think that a new “holocaust” was in the making. But these “missiles” (jumbo firecrackers really) have a range of a few kilometers and no more. In fact, just about the only place they can hit is the border village of Sderot. Human Rights Watch reports that as a result of these 2,700 attacks four Israeli civilians have been killed and 75 injured.

Contrast these “horrendous” casualties with the almost daily reports of 9, 5, 17, 23, 4, ...... Palestinians killed in some Israel counter-action. We have gotten so accustomed to the daily reports of Palestinian dead that no one pays attention. Adding insult to injury, these dead are brushed aside as “collateral damages”. Israel routinely has some low level corporal announce that Israel was targeting a “military installation” and oooops ... just happened to blow up the surrounding civilian neighborhood. Needless to say, the “military installation” is the rooftop from which the Q’assam rocket was allegedly fired.

Who the hell is the one taking the punches here? Any moron can see that it’s the Palestinians who are hemorrhaging. How the hell does it all add up here? Very simply this: Palestinians and Israelis are trading punches. In this wretched game of retaliation, Israel consistently gets in the better and more bloody punch. So be it. But now comes Israel decked out in the usual sack cloth and ashes and says that in addition to its regime of retaliatory collateral damage it has decided that it “has to” further retaliate by putting all of Gaza under a starvation regimen.

Shit by any other name stinks just as bad; and putting an entire civilian population on a “minimal” allotment of food and medicine qualifies as genocide.

©WCG, 2007

Links
07/10/30 Israel Restricts Gaza Crossing as Firing Persists - New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/world/middleeast/29mideast.html?pagewanted=print

Rafael Lemkin on Web:
http://www.preventgenocide.org/lemkin/index.htm

Human Rights Watch Reports
http://hrw.org/reports/2007/iopt0707/1.htm#_Toc170198335