I’ve continually asked for one thing: journalism about the occupation of Palestine that rivals journalism about other outrages. The LA Times has delivered. Read Edmund Sanders’s first few paragraphs from Gaza:
Don’t ask Hatem Hajaj whether there’s a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.
Four months ago, the unemployed salesclerk’s son was born with a heart blockage. Doctors told Hajaj that the baby’s only hope was transfer to a Jerusalem hospital because Gaza lacked a pediatric surgery unit.
While his son, Mohamed, fought to breathe on a ventilator, Hajaj spent a week gathering the transfer documents needed under Israel’s strict border rules. Then there was another agonizing week, watching as his son’s tiny body began to bloat as he waited for an answer.
Approval finally came — two days after Mohamed died.
"Why should it take so long for a days-old innocent baby with such a serious problem?" asked Hajaj, 37, in his Gaza City home, clutching the medical records and authorization form that came too late.
How much more information do our politicians and citizens need to know that the U.S. is underwriting persecution? And the same day, here is an Op-ed by Saree Makdisi attacking the defenestration of Helen Thomas, and linking it to the real problem, racism:
If, however, it is unacceptable to say that Israeli Jews don’t belong in Palestine, it is also unacceptable to say that the Palestinians don’t belong on their own land.
Yet that is said all the time in the United States, without sparking the kind of moral outrage generated by Thomas’ remark. And while the nation’s editorialists worry about the offense she may have caused to Jews, no one seems particularly bothered by the offense felt every day by Palestinians when people — including those with far more power than Thomas — dismiss their rights, degrade their humanity and reject their claims to the most elementary forms of decency.
Are we seriously to accept the idea that some people have more rights than others? Or that some people’s sensibilities should be respected while others’ are trampled with total indifference, if not outright contempt?..
To accept this appalling hypocrisy is to be complicit in the racism of our age.
