I watched your speech outline a position on Hamas’ horrific attack on Israel…wait, wait, excuse me, a correction. I did not watch your speech. I observed, without equivocation, the President of the United States deliver a speech that was obviously written by someone from the Israeli Embassy.
An expression of sympathy for innocent Israeli civilians who suffered from the frightful assault is understandable. A one-sided rendition of the situation is unacceptable. We expected our president to give the necessary condolences and then use the awesome power of a U.S. president to engineer a peaceful solution to the crisis. We did not expect our president to intensify the killing by endorsing a revenge attack expected to be more brutal than the original attack.
Israel’s defense minister said “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed into Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu punctuated the barbaric remark with, “events will reverberate for generations;” innocent Palestinian children will enter the world with physical and mental scars. The bar for war crimes has been raised; nations can use the slain to inflict more severe mass killings on the existing innocents. An ecstatic glee arises from the agony inflicted upon others.
By steering the situation to a personal war between Hamas and Israel and subordinating it to the real issue, you served Israel’s interests. The real and unmentioned issue ─ the Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people in Gaza ─ those from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages of Al-Majdahl, Beit Daras, Falujah, Isdud, Qastina, Hamameh, and others, who did not end their excursion into misery with their arduous trips to Gaza — deserved consideration. Ethnic cleansing was an initial step before wholesale theft of property and valuables. Israel pushed two hundred thousand Palestinians into Gaza to live in tents, sleep on the ground, and exist from aid from Quaker organizations and wages from subservient labor. Internment in refugee camps, brutal occupation, military raids, destruction of facilities, destruction of crops and arable lands, prevention of fishing rights, denial of livelihood, and denial of access to the outside world continued to punish the Gazans without end —traumas that never go away.
A militarily futile Hamas, which has mainly terrorist-type tools, the usual weapons of a resistance movement, is accused of striving to destroy Israel. Still, a mighty and militarized Israel, which has advanced weapons, daily destroys the Palestinians. In retrospect, you and your compatriots have played a leading role in assisting Israel in advancing the oppression, which caused the emergence of Hamas. You are indirectly responsible for creating the building blocks of hate and aggression that led to the Middle East violence and the deadly attacks on innocent populations.
You repeated the words expressed by the most ardent Zionists, turning an extremist reaction to the physical and cultural destruction of the Palestinian people, into the usual emotional tugs of anti-Semitism, another Holocaust, einsatzgruppens, and usurping the words, “traumas that never go away. “
The Washington Post report that your false claim of having seen “confirmed pictures of terrorists beheading children,” came from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson proves that you were reading a document furnished to you.
Hamas may deserve condemnation for the brutal attack, but not acknowledging the brutality that Israel has visited on an innocent people and the brutality that America has visited on multitudes of peoples reduces your rhetoric to a “holier than attitude.” Watson Institute at Brown University reports that “A total of 432,093 civilians have died violent deaths as a direct result of the U.S. post-9/11 wars.” Include Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where more than one hundred thousand civilians were killed for one simple reason — to win a war.
Please explain why you mentioned going to Israel as a young Senator, and why a young Senator would go, at that time, to a little and insignificant country before going to more vital North American and Western European nations. Could it be that you were being subtly groomed by the Israeli Lobby who assured you their cooperation if you cooperated with them?
You recited Golda Meir (Isn’t she the ignorant who said there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, and “Land for people for people without a land?) and repeated her ridiculous statement “We have no place else to go,” capping it with a more ridiculous and false statement that “for 75 years Israel has stood as a guarantor of security for Jewish people throughout the world. “ These spurious and contrived statements have no place in the discussion of the present war and seem intentionally inserted to align the world with the always victimized Zionists. They need a rebuttal.
No place else to go? How about all of the Americas and Western Europe where Jews have been living better than any other group ─ minority and majority? Why are Israelis moving to Germany instead of staying in secure Israel?
Want to guarantee the security of the Jews? Get out of Israel. Weren’t 1,200 Jews killed in the last few days in Israel? Have we heard of any Jews being killed in the Western world during these days? Compare statistics of Jews killed after the establishment of Israel in “secure” Israel and the Western world. In Israel, after 1948, 8246 Jews have been killed and 22000 injured. I’m unsure of the statistics for the Western world and the American continent ─ my guess is less than 100 killed and less than 300 injured.
Want to find hatred of Jews – go to Israel, where the secular Jews despise the Orthodox Jews, the European Ashkenazi Jews are contemptuous of the Arab Mizrahi Jews and all discriminate against the Ethiopian Falasha Jews. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) claims that attacks on Jews (anti-Semitism ) are at an all-time high. If that is true, then the Zionist adventure has not solved the problem and has failed. The association of Jews with apartheid Israel is the principal reason for attacks on Jews. The Zionists have caused the very problem they promised to resolve.
The literature is saturated with prejudices by Israeli authorities against the Middle East and North African Jews, Yemenite Jews, and Ethiopian Jews (Falasha), and the difficulties these groups experienced in integrating into Israeli society. From the BBC: “Many of the Ethiopian Israelis live in the periphery of society that already grapples with issues of unemployment and scarce public resources, makes it more difficult for them to integrate, and causes friction with the more veteran population.”
In the year 2013, 60 years after the Middle East and North African Jews came to Israel, government studies conducted in conjunction with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem found that “a job applicant with an Ashkenazi-sounding name has a 34 percent higher chance of being hired by an employer than a person with a Sephardi-sounding name applying for the same position, [and also that] over 22% of employers openly stated that they actively discriminate against applicants with Arab-sounding names.”
From “Post-Zionism and the Sephardi Question” by Meyrav Wurmser, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005
The post-Zionist Mizrahi writers continue to live their parents’ insults and humiliations at the hands of the European Ashkenazi Jewish establishment that absorbed them in Israel after immigration. Discriminatory policies created a continuing social and economic gap between Mizrahi and Ashkenazim. These academics promote the view held by many young Mizrahi that discrimination did not end with their parent’s generation. The children — who, in large part, were born in Israel — continue to face discrimination and cope with social and economic handicaps.
The ADL statistics on prejudice against Jews, which they label anti-Semitism, are purposely exaggerated. The 2018 ADL report identifies 1,986 anti-Semitic incidents perpetrated throughout the United States in 2017. Included in the totals are 1,015 instances of harassment, many of which occurred in schools, such as “Anti-Semitic graffiti found at non-Jewish school.” The subjective term “vandalism” accounted for 952 incidents, most of them being the tumbling of cemetery tombstones and posting of Swastika drawings, such as “Swastika in Walgreens bathroom,” and “Nazi flag discovered in housing complex,” which were not specifically directed against Jewish persons. Tombstone vandalism is mainly performed by teenagers and rarely has a direct link to a specific prejudice.
The ADL report has 19 assaults against Jews in 2017 – certainly more than a few is alarming. However, the statistic is less alarming when only six were considered as serious, and, of these, the two most serious were (1) Jewish family harassed at local Target, and (2) A 12-year-old boy was attacked on his way home from outside a synagogue after Friday night prayers (no detail of injuries or if attacked because of being Jewish).
I intended to address this letter to the President of the United States. By reading this speech, you forfeited that title. You are Joe Biden, lackey for apartheid Israel
In this conflict, if Israeli tears fill a cup, Palestinian tears will fill an ocean.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
