How many times have we been lectured about so-called western values? I am a person born and raised in the west. I am a westerner, and yet those so-called values are sounding very much like Gazans, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims are utterly disposable. We hear Israel present the situation as if it has no choice but genocide, and we are expected to go along with this? Never. One can be opposed to Hamas, as I am, and to genocide, as I am. That’s not hard to comprehend
Moustafa Bayoumi
What are you doing to stop the imminent ethnic cleansing of Gaza? This is a serious question. If ever there was a time to stand up for the rights of an oppressed people, this is it. And yet, in many places in the western world, you can’t. It’s literally been outlawed. How is this even possible?
As I’m writing this, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the occupied territories, is pleading with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, to demand Israel stop its killing. “The delay in calling on Israel to cease taking revenge on millions of Palestinian civilians,” she wrote on X (formerly Twitter), “is intensifying the descent into [the] abyss.”
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been forcibly displaced by the Israeli military after the entire population of northern Gaza, some 1.1 million people, has been ordered to leave everything behind and move south. (Gaza’s population is mostly refugees from 1948, and some have refused to flee, having once lost their original homes 75 years ago.) Israeli bombs have killed more than 2,670 people, at least 724 of whom were children. And every single member of 47 different Palestinian families – some 500 people, including dozens of children and babies – has been killed by Israeli airstrikes.
The term genocide, like fascism, is often flung around carelessly these days, but it’s worth recalling that there is an official definition. The crime of genocide is “to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. No minimum number of victims is necessary to establish genocide, but the loss must be severe enough that it “will impact the group as a whole”. Since close to 50 families have already and horrifically been exterminated, and we’re only just past the first week of this carnage, what other word should we choose?…
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/17/israel-palestine-hamas-gaza-west-leader-view
*************************************
Israeli Officials Now Promoting Impunity for Settler-Colonial Violence
Revealing New Evidence in Abu Akleh’s Killing, Al Jazeera Sues Israeli Forces at ICC
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Belgian Minister Says What Biden Won’t: Israel Is Wiping Entire Palestinian Villages Off the Map
Europe Ignoring Israeli War Crimes under Guise of Combating anti-Semitism: new report
UN recognition of Palestinian Nakba counters the myth that Israel was created on empty land
After the truth-shower 