Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Death in Gaza, Déjà Vu


A Living Hell

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
CounterPunch


".....Gaza again is a living hell, all of it on record for the world to see. The death toll is climbing by the hour. The photos are everywhere but the New York Times has only a paragraph on the fear Israeli children experience from the loud noises and clamor. You have forgotten the other half of humanity, Mr. Publisher. Not the other half, really; the other 9/10ths of the world. When will you comment on the trauma the Gazan child experiences, and repeatedly, with children across the world under the bombs of the United States and Israel?

All the sounds and sights and smells of slaughter verify the damage and danger of aerial assaults and targeted killings; Apartment buildings still buzzing with human activity when missiles pierced through their ceilings offer up their dead and wounded to the deafening skies. Progressive US President Barak Obama and his allies applaud Israel’s masterful techniques of preventive war as self-defense; its sophistication at using state of the art weaponry against mosques, homes, markets and schools; re-emphasize at press conferences the right of Israel to defend itself against the human cattle they have justly corralled into densely packed camps to be bound and slaughtered or starved and transferred elsewhere. All of it is happening again, today, before our very eyes; before the universal documents proclaiming the rights of mankind and international humanitarian law; before the leaders who have so eagerly abandoned due process and civil liberties but fear the rising tide of rebellion in the Middle East and elsewhere? How dare we pontificate on the atrocities of Damascus after sponsoring such a Juggernaut for Jerusalem? For Gaza? What educated public can still claim they didn’t know? How can anyone any longer pretend the earth was not boiling beneath us like lava under an active volcano?"

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