Joe Biden condemned the attack on Donald Trump yesterday, saying, “It’s sick… The idea that there’s political violence or violence in America like this is just unheard of.”
Sadly, there is considerable evidence that Biden is wrong, and there has long been political violence in America.
What no one in public life can dispute is that political violence aimed at Palestinians is an enduring condition of Palestinian life. And Israel – an occupying apartheid state committing what most experts call war crimes akin to genocide – is willing to kill endless numbers of civilians to achieve its supposed goals in Palestine.
And the New York Times will then justify the killings as necessary military tactics.
This week saw yet two more massacres of Palestinian civilians. Israel bombed a school in Nuseirat refugee camp and killed 16.
Then Israel bombed what it had called a safe zone in Mawasi, killing at least 90. And how many others are buried under rubble and sand?
In each case, Israel said it was going after Hamas leaders. And American officials had little to say about the massacres. No, they are just numb to a genocide that is being carried out with American weaponry, with the president’s blessing. It is sick, to use Biden’s words, and tragic that we will have to wait for history, in another 10 or 20 years, until the best minds of mainstream discourse admit what any decent person can see before their eyes right now.
The lack of outrage stands in sharp contrast to the overwhelming condemnation of Russian bombings in the Ukraine, including an attack on a hospital this week that some said should go to the International Criminal Court. Israel must never be held to any standard. And the world sees it.
Abetting the war crimes is the New York Times. It ran a long article this week about how Hamas fights, saying that Hamas hides its “ghost army” among civilians, leaving Israel no alternative but to slaughter civilians.
They hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons in miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas — even a child’s bedroom — blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants. …
After Israeli ground troops invaded in late October, Hamas went further in transforming civilian areas of Gaza into military zones, setting traps in scores of neighborhoods and creating confusion about what a combatant looks like by dressing its fighters as civilians.
The Times accepted the view that this sneakiness justifies Israel’s tactics:
Israeli officials say that Hamas’s tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.
So Israel has been “forced” to kill 40,000 Palestinians.
This is moral idiocy. Of course Hamas hides among civilians. That is what guerrilla armies fighting overwhelming force underwritten by a superpower have done forever. The revolutionaries in colonial America did the same thing.
“I was shocked by the story, it is unbelievable,” media critic Donald Johnson writes. “The Times wrote this to defend every attack on civilians and civilian infrastructure that Israel has carried out. They couldn’t have done it any different if they handed it over to the Israeli government to write. Every single thing Israel does— it is Hamas’s fault.”
Johnson wrote to the Times and raised the most obvious analogy, the U.S. massacres of villages in Vietnam.
“I am old enough to remember Americans making the same excuses about My Lai. Your reporters are a disgrace, your paper is a disgrace. You might as well have had the IDF write that article.”
It’s funny seeing myself described as a media critic. True, but we all are.
Anyway, like other Twitter users I have seen many of the videos the NYT describes and you can tell the Hamas fighters are fighters because they are the guys in civilian vilian clothes carrying rifles and rocket launchers or coming out of tunnels running towards tanks in order to place explosives on them. So by the laws of war, the IDF guts are allowed to shoot at them. They aren’t allowed to shoot unarmed men, women or children. The NYT seems confused about this.
And the destruction of civilian property — I have watched a lot of those videos too and it is obvious that the soldiers doing this are sadistic cretins who like to paw women’s underwear, mock personal items like diplomas before destroying them, burn books, blow up universities, and oh yes, steal personal items to give their girlfriends. And they laugh and laugh. One or two tapes show them firing off what must be dozens of bullets randomly into a bombed out neighborhood.
The Israeli magazine 972 has published several damning pieces on the IDF’s behavior but that is because they are real journalists.
“This is moral idiocy. Of course Hamas hides among civilians. That is what guerrilla armies fighting overwhelming force underwritten by a superpower have done forever. The revolutionaries in colonial America did the same thing.”
“The guerrilla tactics that Americans had learned during Indian wars proved very effective in fighting the British army. Militia men struck quickly, often from behind trees or fences, then disappeared into the forests. Because many Americans wore ordinary clothing, it was difficult for the British to distinguish rebels and loyalists.”
https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&psid=3220
( If only Hamas would wear bright red uniforms… )
“Of course Hamas hides among civilians.”
No, they hide behind concrete walls, because they have no armour. What do you expect? That they confront Israel’s tanks, artillery, and airplanes in an open field?
Managing the narrative is how the West is ruled.
“The revolutionaries in colonial America did the same thing.“
Wow, Phil Weiss shamelessly compares Hamas to American revolutionaries:
Yahya Sinwar as Paul Revere? Mohammed Def as John Hancock? Ismail Haniyah as Benjamin Franklin?
Did American revolutionaries perpetrate mass murder, rape and kidnapping of innocent civilians? Did they use hospitals ,schools, mosques (or churches, in their case) as cover for military-terrorist activities? I don’t think so. (But if they did, I condemn them…)