Killing with Impunity

“Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America.” Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning.

How does an Israeli soldier shoot an unarmed Palestinian, a human being? What does the soldier feel as he or she brings a man or boy into the crosshairs? Is there any remorse after pulling the trigger, any flicker of conscience hours or days later? Dozens of non-violent Palestinian protesters have been killed by the Israeli Defense Forces in the past few weeks, thousands more wounded or injured. The protesters pose no lethal threat to Israel, they are not surging across the border, crossing from their occupied territory into Israel, and yet Israeli soldiers fire live ammunition into crowds. Think of the military officers who issue these shoot-to-kill orders. Why don’t Palestinian deaths matter? Palestinians are protesting the longest military occupation in modern history, an occupation that couldn’t be sustained without unquestioned backing from the United States. Why does my country support this slow, ongoing genocide?

To kill with impunity and without remorse requires indoctrination. You must convince your own people that you are killing inferiors or terrorists. Hitler’s regime indoctrinated many Germans to believe that Jews were the source of Germany’s problems, a blight on the purity of the German nation. Jews were systematically dehumanized, their rights abridged, their property stolen; but even this wasn’t enough, the Jews had to be exterminated, wiped out. Hasn’t Israel been doing the very same thing to Palestinians for more than half a century?

Israel has perfected the tactic of deflecting any and all criticism by shouting, screaming, and fulminating that all its critics are anti-Semitic. Israel has a right to exist as a state. It has a right to security. But it doesn’t have a right to murder unarmed people. It doesn’t have the right to bomb Gaza every few years in what is known in Israeli defense circles as “mowing the lawn.” It doesn’t have the right to control who and what enters or exits Gaza, the right to control Gaza’s airspace and territorial waters. Aside from the United States, no nation in the world gets away with murder like Israel does, year after year, decade after decade.

Short Takes:

The Trump kleptocracy is right on track, normalizing corruption, hastening the fall of the American empire. The oligarchs must know, on some level, that the end is near because they’re making a mad grab for as many spoils as they can haul.

Capitalism is killing us, and the planet. Goes to show that any ideology taken to extremes will produce tyranny.

Fukushima is now the worst nuclear disaster in history. Seven years gone and the media has no interest, as if by ignoring the calamity it will vanish. Kind of the same charade Trump and the Republicans play with anthropogenic climate change.

I was fortunate to meet author and activist Tasoula Hadjitofi when she visited Santa Barbara on April 29. I reviewed her book, The Icon Hunter, for the SB Independent. Hadjitofi is a gracious, intelligent and intrepid woman.