culpable on Gaza’s atrocities

quoting Chris Hedges:

The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel, it is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battlefield on a largely defenseless civilian population, is the final phase in a decades-long campaign to ethnically-cleanse Palestinians. The assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless, and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza, where life for Palestinians will be barely sustainable.

It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut-off movement, food, medicine, and goods to perpetuate the misery.

Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and naval vessels to bomb densely-crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks, mosques, and slums to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command in control, no army… and calls it a war. It is not a war, it is murder.

The refusal by our political leaders, from Barack Obama to all but 5 members of congress to the major media to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and our hypocrisy. The public debate about the Gaza attacks engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians, whose security and dignity is being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians is betrayal of the memory of all those killed in other genocides in other times. The lesson of the holocaust is not that Jews are special, it is not that Jews are unique, it is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson is that when you have the capacity to halt genocide and you do not, no matter who carries out that genocide or who it is directed against, you are culpable.