Americans should be ashamed
WITH South Africa’s bold, watershed move to file on January 11 a case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of genocide and with the US’ continued military and diplomatic support for the Israelis’ non-stop massacre of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Americans should be ashamed of themselves.
How can a people claiming to be the champions of humanity’s noblest values, human rights and democracy especially allow the Frankenstein monster they helped create and mainly nurtured, Israel, to massacre over 23,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, including 8,000 children, in just three months? Over 1,000 Palestinian children have been amputated of their legs or arms because of the Israelis’ indiscriminate bombings. And such atrocities are even witnessed in real-time all around the world.
The ferocity of the Israelis has been such that they have bombed even hospitals and refugee camps as well as convoys of refugees fleeing as they themselves ordered northern Gaza. The area is now said to be inhabitable, with its urban areas reduced to rubble where thousands of Palestinian children and elderly are buried, together with hundreds of unexploded bombs.
The Israeli aim apparently is to transform Gaza into its unpopulated security perimeter. Humanity cannot allow 5 million Palestinians to be driven out of their homelands or killed by sheer starvation and disease.
Israel’s dreaded Military Intelligence Directorate had tracked Palestinian journalists, even those working for the Qatar government’s Al-Jazeera, and assassinated them, 79 so far, several including their families when Israeli drones bombed their apartments.
The US, the most powerful nation on Earth and the self-proclaimed guardian of the international rule of law, continues to support the massacres by Israel. This British- and American-invented state of just 560,000 Jews (and 1 million Palestinians) when it was established in 1948 would have been nothing, most probably overrun by its Muslim neighbors, if not for the $160 billion economic and military aid American taxpayers have given it since 1946 intended to have the equivalent of their personal armed bodyguards in that oil-rich neighborhood.
Outraged
Yet even with the entire world outraged at Israel’s massacre of civilians and its rejection of alleged US pleas to stop these atrocities, US President Biden has asked the American Congress to authorize another $14.3 billion assistance to Israel. Biden didn’t even wait for Congress approval and, under the excuse that it was an “emergency sale,” sent 14,000 rounds of tank ammunition to the Israeli troops.
With modern media, we all know why the Israelis have started to run out of tank ammunition: these mobile cannons have been shelling even densely populated areas wherever they think there are Palestinians, even hospitals and refugee camps. Americans are funding the genocide of Palestinians.
Indeed, there is much validity in the argument, “Stop US money flowing into Israel, the genocide would end.”
Americans invoke and demand the rule of law only when it is in their interest. The US has the so-called Leahy Law, which prohibits the US government from extending funds to units of foreign security forces where there is credible information implicating that unit in the commission of gross violations of human rights. The law requires a vetting process before such assistance can be given. However, instead of the normal vetting process, the US State Department created a special procedure just for Israel, wrote Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man in an article in the British newspaper The Guardian. The procedure simply turns a blind eye to Israelis’ human rights violations on the grounds that the units cannot be determined.
US hypocrisy
To the benefit of humanity, the silver lining to this tragedy is that US hypocrisy has been exposed by its implicit support of the Israeli genocide of Palestinians. It is a turning point in global public opinion: the US can no longer claim to be the guardian of the rule of law and democracy, an excuse it has used in the post-war era to invade or control sovereign nations to advance its global hegemony.
It is a testament to the US power over global media that there has been muted coverage of South Africa’s accusation made formally at the International Court of Justice that Israel has committed genocidal acts against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. If Israel is proven guilty of the charges — and there is tons of evidence proving it so — it is also the US, its main funder, that should also be condemned of genocide. The US would be pulled down from its high moral ground, its “republican democracy,” in this case, proven to be a state controlled by billionaire Jews.
Here are the five main “genocidal acts” that Adila Hassim, one of the advocates representing South Africa in the ICJ proceedings, accused Israel of having perpetrated during the war, as reported by Al-Jazeera:
Mass killings of Palestinians
“‘The first genocidal act is the mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza,” Hassim said, showing the court pictures of mass graves where bodies were buried, ‘often unidentified.’ She said Israel has deployed highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs in parts of Gaza that it has itself declared safe. More than 1,800 families have lost multiple family members, while some families do not have any survivors left, Hassim said. No one has been spared, not babies, and especially not children, she added.
The second genocidal act, Hassim said, ‘is Israel’s infliction of serious mental and bodily harm’ on the people in Gaza. Close to 60,000 people have been wounded and maimed, most of them women and children, in a place where the health system has collapsed, she added. Hassim cited the arrest of large numbers of Palestinians, including children, who were undressed and loaded onto trucks going to unknown locations. ‘The suffering of the Palestinian people, physical and mental, is undeniable,’ she said.
Hassim said Israel has deliberately imposed conditions that cannot sustain life and that are calculated to bring about the destruction of Gaza through its forced displacement of most of the population. Hassim said thousands of families have been displaced multiple times, with half a million now having no homes to return to. She cited how Israel gave entire hospitals orders to evacuate within 24 hours with no assistance in moving the injured or in moving medical supplies. It did the same with large parts of northern Gaza, where more than one million people were asked to move at short notice.
‘The order itself was genocidal,’ Hassim said.
The lawyer said Israel has also blockaded food and water from the Strip, causing widespread hunger, and that it has removed the ability to distribute what is available by restricting the movement of aid workers. Hassim played a clip that showed hundreds of Palestinians running after a truck carrying aid into Gaza.
Israel, Hassim added, has also deliberately imposed conditions denying Palestinians in Gaza adequate shelter, clothes, bedding and other critical non-food items. She said there’s no safe water to drink, clean and cook, and that disease cases, including diarrhea, are soaring. She said more Palestinians may die from hunger and disease, yet the siege continues.
Destruction
The fourth genocidal action, Hassim said, is Israel’s military assault on Gaza’s healthcare system that renders life there unsustainable. Gaza’s healthcare was already crippled by years of attacks by Israel, she said, and now, it is simply unable to cope with the sheer number of injured people who need life-saving treatment. Lastly, Hassim added Israel is blocking the life-saving treatment needed to deliver babies. This, she added, amounts to preventing births in Gaza and is an act of genocide. Hassim also cited Reem Alsalem, UN special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, who had earlier warned that the ‘reproductive violence inflicted by Israel on Palestinian women, newborn babies infants and children … could be qualified as acts of genocide.'”
Israel was founded on the justification that a Holocaust of Jews by the German Nazis during World War 2 cannot be repeated ever again. It is indeed ironic that South Africa alleges at the ICJ that Israel violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, signed in 1948, to prevent genocides like the Holocaust.
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Americans should be ashamed
Source: Breaking News PH
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