ACCORDING to Britain’s esteemed medical journal, The Lancet, 186,000 Palestinian adults and children have so far been killed or died of disease in Gaza. Nearly 600 Palestinians have been killed on the Israeli-occupied West Bank while 10,000 Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons.
The official Arab death toll to date is 39,670, including more than 15,000 children. Close to 80,000 Palestinians have been wounded.
Israel says 1,139 Israelis were killed. Half of Gaza’s homes have been destroyed by constant shelling, bombing and tank fire. Polio has just broken out in Gaza and the United Nations reports mass starvation there. Animals in Gaza – mainly horses and donkeys – have suffered terribly.
This is not a “war”, as the media calls it. It is an ongoing massacre, shooting fish in a barrel. The two men who made possible this huge massacre, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and outgoing US President Joe Biden, met this week in Washington to talk about their “success” in Gaza. Many members of the US Congress applauded Netanyahu like trained seals.
Meanwhile, the US shipped thousands more 500lbs and 2,000lbs bombs and 105mm tank shells to Israel in violation of America’s arms export laws.
The arrest warrant issued against Netanyahu by the International Court of Justice was ignored by the US, which refuses to recognise the World Court. And for good reason. Former President George W. Bush who committed a massive war crime in the trumped-up war against Iraq would have been arrested and put on trial. Add Biden and Tony Blair to this list of malefactors.
The US atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki killed an estimated 40,000. That puts the current death and wounded toll in Gaza within the range of Nagasaki, just at a slower pace. The number of dead and wounded at Hiroshima was around 70,000. Mass sickness and starvation ensued, as it is today in Gaza.
Many misinformed Americans and supporters of Israel still applaud Biden. They are wrong. He has blackened America’s name and disgraced the nation with its role in the Gaza massacre and made a mockery of the UN. At least presidential candidate Kamala Harris has done the right thing by calling for the creation of a Palestinian state. She is already under fire from Israel’s extreme right-wing parties. They are obsessed by the potent Palestinian birth rate.
Inside Israel, they talk about ways to slow down the Arab birth rate in the West Bank and Gaza, and 2,000 bombs are an effective way.
Many Americans know nothing of this genocide. Their biased news networks show little of the horrors of Gaza. The only network that does effective reporting from Gaza is Al-Jazeera. I expect it will soon be banned “for supporting terrorism”.
The next target of the far right will be social media. Young Americans who watch internet news are demonstrating across the country because they have more access to real news than older Americans.
At the base of American politics, vast sums of money remain the dominant factor. Half of the money flowing to the Biden administration has reportedly come from pro-Israel Democratic sources. Wall Street remains the giant cash cow for pro-Israel forces. Donald Trump is being given US$100 million (RM464 million) by the billionaire Israeli-American widow of Las Vegas gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson. That will buy an awful lot of the small-town used car salesmen who make up our corrupt Congress.
The writer is a syndicated columnist.
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