Those of us that haven’t been totally de-sensitized by constant exposure to slaughter will continue to reel at the naked cruelty of what is being done by Israel to the Palestinian people. Over 30,000 deaths in a few months, many of them women and children. No buildings are spared – hospitals, refugee camps, homes, roads. This has been going on openly for week after week; but we mustn’t think the US and the UK haven’t noticed.
‘Mr Biden said he was “outraged and heartbroken” at the news as he said Israel had not done enough to protect aid workers.’ And Rishi Sunak? ‘On Tuesday evening, Mr Sunak telephoned Benjamin Netanyahu to say that “far too many aid workers and ordinary civilians have lost their lives in Gaza.”
Dear God. Have these two men been in some sort of catatonic trance for the last four months? Within days of the October 7 invasion of Israel by Hamas, Israel has responded by a scorched earth policy deliberately designed to kill and starve the population of Gaza.
It’s not a new kind of policy – it was flourishing in Ireland during the plantation of Munster by the English in the sixteenth century. Here’s the poet Edmund Spencer on what was to be seen in Munster then:
“Out of every corner of the wood and glens they came creeping forth upon their hands, for their legs could not bear them; they looked Anatomies [of] death, they spoke like ghosts, crying out of their graves; they did eat of the carrions [corpses], happy where they could find them, yea, and one another soon after, in so much as the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of their graves; and if they found a plot of water-cresses or shamrocks, their they flocked as to a feast for the time, yet not able long to continue therewithal; that in a short space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast”
And yes, Virginia, that’s the same Spencer who wrote ‘The Faerie Queen’.
By 1589, one third of Munster’s population had disappeared.
Ten years later Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, with its arch-villain Shylock telling his conniving Gentile rivals about the example they’d set: ‘The villainy you teach me, I will execute – and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction”.
Gaza is ghastly but not unique.
Very good jude free Palestine
Thank you, James. And ditto..
What is ghastly is an Irish American president giving military aid to a country treating its civilians as the civilians of Munster were treated.
It is beyond shameful.
Really?
It must stop.
The slaughter of those people who were helping to feed the hungry is an unspeakably cruel act. I do not understand what Israel hopes to gain from such a horrible deed. Surely they must have known who was in those vehicles? Had it been full of Hamas members then it would have been understandable, from a military point of view but there has been no suggestion of that being the case. The IDF say they will have an inquiry, well I have as much faith in their investigations as I would have in any carried out by the British. Just a mixture of hogwash and whitewash.
As far as the general picture goes, Israel is using the attack on October 7th to wipe out Hamas. They will only stop when they want to. Condemnations mean nothing to them, nobody really mentions the wanton slaughter carried out by Hamas, it is only because the IDF are a much larger and well armed military machine and are capable of wiping out thousands of residents in Gaza that Israel’s enemies complain. If Hamas had the same weapons as Israel they would use them. Personally I would love to see a ceasefire, I would have preferred it if Israel had shown a measure of caution but that was never really an option. Like every war the innocent suffer more than the guilty.
Thank you, James. And ditto..
Anne Ireland is shocked that an Irish American can support genocide.
Ethnicity does not determine Ethics.
Jews and Gentiles, Black, white, yellow-skinned and freckled can behave morally and immorally,
Most western Governments currently support the Zionist Genocide and are complicit in that atrocity.
No independent witness has supported the Israeli allegations of Hamas rapes and tortures of October 7th.
I am not shocked.
Just last week our most Irish of US presidents oversaw the latest delivery of arms to the Nazionists. Plane loads of jets and 2000 lb bombs. Ah but they were told ‘Be careful where you drop them’.