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Why have shocking pictures of devastation, suffering and the killing of more than three hundred and fity children in Gaza, caused such little outrage among the mainstream media and conscience of the United States? In the international media, stories abound of children being massacred, as part of the military strategy of Israeli state terrorism, supported by weapons from the United States, to stop Hamas firing rockets into Israel, that has resulted in four deaths. Hamas's launching of rockets from Gaza is an act of terrorism. But terrorism is most destructive when it disguises itself as a legitimate act of violence, with chemical warfare such as white phosporous, fixed wing F-16 American aircraft, Appache helicopter gunships and drones with rockets firing on a civilian population besieged with no possible escape.
The Israeli government, portrays itself as a victim and refuses to end the slaughter of civilians and children on the basis, that its military operations have not yet been successful enough. In our modern world children no longer serve as an ethical deterrent, against acts of barbarism, they are simply regarded as collateral damage, while these inhumane acts are justified under the pretense of necessity and "surgical strikes"a language that reveals more about Israel, that uses such language than their war crimes which it describes.
Is a military offensive on a besieged city justified, when it is killing over 350 defenseless children or one third of the total victimes, with precision strikes ? What does it mean when military disproportionality is treated by the corporate media, as a fact and not understood as part of the equation, used to define state terrorism, particularly when the sophisticated military weapons are used unchallenged, against a densely crowded, mostly defeceless civilian population?
Why are the shocking images of a two year-old child hit by an Israeli shell, while running for safety treated with heartless disdain, by the mainstream media.? It was described by an aid worker as folows: "It was like charcoal. ...without any limbs, because some of the animals ate some of his limbs." Is it conceivable that Palestinians are now viewed as a disposable population, without any redeeming value, that even images of Palestinian children being blown apart by the Israeli army, no longer elicits moral outrage or rigorous political criticism?
David Goldberg points out in his recent book, The Threat of Race, populations such as the Palestinians, marked as targets to be dispensed with, "heel on face eating dust when they have anything to eat at all ... deserted, reduced to philistinism, untrusted because untrustworthy. And once deserted, having nowhere to turn, no one to appeal to but a few folks of conscience, they are fair game."
All of this embodies the ideology of a racist state, in which it is assumed that in the absence of Palestinians, including children, there would be no police violence, threats, insecurity, checkpoints, blockades, economic problems, immigrants, just a racially cleansed chosen society, no longer at war with itself and others. The shame of racist stae violence, combined with the practices of state terrorism, are hardly a legitimizing foundation, normative or political, for the repulsive images and deadly actions of the type we see in Gaza, promoted by Israel in the name of a civilized democracy.
A thorough analysis of the systematic killing of children in Gaza is important, because it measures the relationship between military power and aggression and the realities of massive suffering and death shaped by the expansionist Israeli state. The plight of the children of Gaza must play a central role in reclaiming democratic values, practices, and relations that would make such war crimes against children indefensible, regardless of the claims to justice, defense, and civilzed democracy, made by Israel, for whom a child's death can be legitimate, as an unfortunate element in waging a successful military war or liquidating a civilian population of resistance.
There is much more at work In Gaza, than the horror of children being killed senselessly, there is a suppressed history, dangerous memories of entire populations being displaced from their original homes in Israel to the Gaza refugee camp and how the unchecked state power of Israel, commits the most ruthless deeds of a holocaust, in the name of fighting terrorism and spreading civilized democracy. But there is more, it is also the issue of what Israel has become when it has lost its ability to question power, views military values, as the highest ideals, ignores international law and becomes indifferent to the suffering of the most innocent and defenseless children.
Surely, we are witnessing a crime against humanity for which indifference and silence makes everyone silent, deeply complicit with the killing and disappearance of young children. Gaza reminds us that the "dark times" that haunted the concentration camps of the second world war, can now be seen in the images of wounded and dead children and should serve as a desperate reminder of what it means when politics, social responsibility, and justice, as the lifeblood of democracy, become cold, indifferent, de-humanized values of holocaust denial, in the face of death.
Tags: Middle East | Israel | Gaza | holocaust | World | Palestine | Gaza Strip | denial | US Politics | middle+east | War+Crimes
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