During the Troubles, there were politicians and pundits who liked to use the dead. They would, figuratively speaking, stand on the coffin of someone killed in conflict and denounce those involved in the killing. There would have been many other killings happening, but only those most convenient as platforms were used to denounce the enemy.
I thought back to that time when I heard of the incursion of Hamas into Israel, where they have killed hundreds of Israelis. The world or much of it has been quick to spring to Israel’s defence. Joe Biden has guaranteed them increased supplies of weaponry; Keir Starmer has been loud in his condemnation of Hamas: “This is an appalling attack on Israel, a terrorist attack, for which there is no justification”. Labour’s Emily Thornberry was on TV supporting her boss’s line, appalled by this terrorist violence.
Anyone who doesn’t stop with the condemnation of Hamas is immediately labelled anti-Semitic. Well, here I go.
In 2020, Israeli armed forces killed over 100 Palestinians. In 2021 Israeli armed forces killed 319 Palestinians and demolished the home of 895 Palestinians. In 2022 more than 170 Palestinians were killed by Israeli armed forces, including 30 children.
Over two million Palestinians live on the Gaza Strip, which is smaller than County Louth, which is the smallest county in Ireland.
Of all people on the planet, the Israelis should surely feel empathy with an oppressed people. But should butters no parsnips. Israel, with support in weaponry from the US, has for years shown contempt for the lives of Palestinians. Some they kill, some they keep living in conditions which are appalling, with Gaze described by some journalists as a huge out-door prison.
Does Joe Biden, does Keir Starmer, does Emily Thornberry not care what happens to these millions of people? Or are they so blind they literally don’t see the mass crimes out of which have grown the Hamas actions of recent days? And when will some political party leader, in the US, in Britain, in Ireland, have the guts to stand up and say “The deaths of innocent Israelis at the hands of Hamas in recent days can be traced to the barbarous treatment of millions of Palestinians?”
Go on, guys, just say it. The truth will set you free.
“The evil that men do lives after them…”
It is time for a ceasefire and an honourable, negotiated peace settlement which is based on respect for the right to life, dignity and human rights.
You are a good man free Palestine
If you spend decades brutalising people don’t be surprised if they act brutally towards you, given half a chance. It was precisely for this reason that slave owners feared their slaves and Germans in the east killed themselves en masse as the Red Army powered towards them. They knew exactly how the German Army had behaved in the east and so feared their rightful retribution.
I don’t condone any violence and have Served overseas in Lebanon the Palestine people have been pushed from their lands and corralled into locations like Gaza, like what happened to the Native Americans being pushed from their lands to reservations so the Americans have no quams about arming the IDF with all the updated arment they need.
A people can only be pushed so far before they retaliate. The attack by Hamas on a music festival was totally wrong a lot of people killed, murdered, and others taken as prisoners this will only result in another excuse for an invasion ( RUBICON ) of Lebanon like the one in 82 which I was present for, and a lot of more innocent men, women and children being killed. Lord look after our troops in Lebanon and keep them safe.
You are right about Israel’s nasty behavior to the to the Palestinians.
This is my response to Jimmy Flanagan. I think you are confused. On the one hand you say you don’t condone any violence but yet you were a member of an armed force. What is an armed force for if not the use of violence in whatever circumstance are deemed necessary? Or did you arrive in Lebanon without weapons, saying prayers for people and singing kumbaya?
Would you have told the Warsaw Ghetto resisters that you, as a moral paragon, couldn’t condone their violence? Really? Would you tell native Americans, subjected to a vile, brutal genocide, oh no violence is always wrong you must stoically suffer your fate, take whatever butchery comes your way without any response, presumably to get their reward in heaven?
Israel has never been short of “excuses” to slaughter hundred of thousands of people. It is part and parcel of being a repulsive ethno.supremacist, genocidal ideology. I don’t abuse the Nazi term but that is exactly what Zionists are. And never more apparent than right now. They covet this land and they have absolutely no qualms about how many people they need to slaughter to get it.
What happened when the Palestinians tried the non violent option of protest, e.g. The Great March of Return? Oh that’s right, they were slaughtered. Men, women, children, even babies. And thousands deliberately crippled by IDF butchers. Thousands of victims living in a concentration camp with little or no access to medical care.
Just like the victims in the Warsaw Ghetto, the Palestinians have nothing left to lose. They were destined for genocide anyway so they have the courage and dignity to, at the very least, not go to their slaughter without a fight. They are all heroes and deserve the unflinching support of anybody who has a shred of moral fibre left in themselves.
The state of Israel has been a moral abomination from the very start and anybody who does not wholly condemn its genocidal nature and practices is complicit in this ongoing stain on humanity. It is breathtaking that in these current circumstances, when an actual genocide is being played out in full view of the entire world, your main concern is for a few of your countrymen who might be inadvertently killed by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I assume you think that, were they to find themselves under attack, they would be perfectly entitled to use violence to protect themselves (as indeed would I) Mr I don’t condone any violence.
As I have already stated, if you brutalise people for almost 100 years, don’t be surprised if they behave brutally when they get an opportunity to fight back. The Palestinians are heroes, every single one, and definitely including the fighters. Violence is always horrific but unfortunately sometimes very necessary and a moral imperative. Unless you are an unequivocal pacifist, which you’re obviously not, you are demonstrating pure hypocrisy and probably, quite frankly, egregious racism.
100% right. You could also have mentioned the massacre at the Sabra and Shallia refugee camps and other massacres and you would be correct and would still have not covered half of the monsterous attacks on Palestinians. In those refugee camps neo-nazi Lebanese Phalange in co-operation with the Isreali army slaughtered 3000 children, women, the old and anybody who couldn’t escape.
Tragically, there’s a Himalayan mountain range of evidence to adduce why the Palestinians have the undeniable and unconditional right to fight back against, in whatever way possible, their oppressors. But clearly it’s still not enough to convince sanctimonious liberal hand wringers to open their eyes and conscieinces and face the truth.. We in the west should be utterly ashamed of ourselves. Enthusiastically applauding members of the Waffen SS in parliament as “heroes” and enthusiastically cheering on Nazis ito commit genocide in Palestine. I don’t believe in God but can only hope that karma is really a thing.
The story of the Palestinian people is a shameful stain on all our houses.
A people who fought along side the British to remove the Turks during WW1 only to be betrayed by their new British Imperial overlords in the Balfour Declaration.
They have watched as successive Israeli governments enact their grand plan to erase every trace of the existence of the historic inhabitants of Palestine.
It is no accident that the US have offered more weapons to one of the most powerful military forces on the planet. AIPAC the face of the Zionist lobby in the US can remove presidents with the stroke of a pen similar to the way the Zionist lobby in Britain help spearhead the removal from the Labour Party of Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone, Jackie Walker, Chris Williamson, Tony Greenstein, Marc Wadsworth and Diane Abbott to name but a few but infact any member who spoke up against the apartheid regime in Israel.
How are Palestinian’s to feel in their open air prisons when they see internationals laws being flouted, when they see their sacred places being desecrated, when they see their homes demolished, children murdered and jailed without due process?
What do they feel when they listen to the silence in the western press as hundreds of Palestinian civilians will now be murdered by an angry unaccountable regime in Tel Aviv that is hungry for their eradication as a nation and a people.
No proponents of an end to apartheid in Israel will be given air time over the next days when the veil will be pulled over the slaughter house that is Gaza and the West Bank.
Of course the kidnapping and murder of Israeli citizens is to be condemned but it is to be condemned knowing that the loss of their precious lives is the unavoidable outworking of a powerful and illegal plan to sieze and colonise the land belonging to others.
The descendants of those who persecuted to native American Indians into virtual extinction are no role models to be lecturing the world on honesty and fairness.
The rest of the world outside the US and Western Europe look on at the travesty of injustice perpetrated on the Palestinian people with anger and frustration.
Will the day come when they question us about what we did when the Palestinian people were persecuted out of their own land, and what will our answer be?
Our little Jewish ulster in the middle East.
Jude, thank you for highlighting the truth.
Calling it a massacre of Jewish civilians is nigh unto an oxymoron, as effectively every “Israeli” (so-called ) is , has been or will be in the terrorist force known as the IDF, they all have military training , supplied by Uncle Sam of course and they are armed to the teeth to boot, please stop calling them innocent civilians. Murdering people for their property is a crime in most civilised countries yet these thugs get away with it on a daily basis, then acting the victim when it suits them.
Of course the US and UK are breaking their necks to offer help and advice to the poor defenceless Zionists. But then who has more experience in land theft and genocide than them. As we are well aware. The yanks are afraid their banking system would collapse if the Zionists were offended.
In war you have to dehumanise your enemy. I never protested against the IRA bombs which killed innocent children, my unionist friends never once raised their voices against the sectarian murder of Catholics. The British media ignored their soldier’s killings here. The free state only cried when their police or soldiers were hurt. The Israelis will blow Gaza to smithereens, none of the victims stories will be personalised in the way those poor Jewish people’s were. The British and western media in general, with a few honourable exceptions, will pile on the criticism of Hamas and just regard Israel’s actions as a necessary evil at best. That’s because they regard the Israelis as civilised, European almost, while the Arabs are associated with bombs and terror. We Irish were treated the same, it was Irish Republicans who carried out attacks in England. We were the enemy. As for the likes of Starmer, he would never take a principled stand on something like that. Too close to the election.
You could have stopped at he would never take a principled stand. Now there’s a nascent fascist if ever I saw one.