by B. R. GOWANI
When to mourn & when to celebrate
Muslims (and non-Muslim victims) should follow some strict rules — always applicable when the US or Israel is teaching you a lesson by bombing the hell out of you: when to mourn and when to celebrate (or when not to mourn and not to celebrate).
- When the US (or Israel) kill Muslims, they are not to be mourned; they were “terrorists.” If you mourn, then you are one of them — a “terrorist.” (For non-Muslim victims, the labels vary: “communists” or “commies,” “Nazis,” “Hitler,” and so on.)
- When the US or Israel is celebrating the elimination of “terrorists” then you should join them because that’s the only time you are allowed to celebrate.
- When some underdog Muslims retaliate, sometimes in an equally gruesome manner, join the US or Israel in their mourning rituals and in condemning them.
The 1991 US war against Iraq resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure. It was followed by US sanctions which led to more deaths, including a half million children. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked by CBS’s Lesley Stahl whether the “price was worth it?” Albright nonchalantly replied:
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price – we think the price is worth it.”
Not to forget Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, one of the central characters in Obama administration who joined Britain and France in overthrowing Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and pushing Libya into chaos. Hillary felt exhilarated at Gaddafi’s death and rephrased Roman Emperor Julius Caesar.
When Secretary Albright says killing of 500,000 children through sanctions is worth it, you nod your head in agreement. When Secretary Clinton gleefully announces Gaddafi’s death, you too put a smiling face.
If you don’t, then you know what you’ll be called. The US, Israel, and India’s Hindu communalist government of Narendra Modi hold joint copyrights to the word “terrorist(s)”.
What to forget and what to remember
The mourning and celebration rules also apply to what to forget and what not to.
- When the US and Israel bomb and kill your people and destroy your infrastructure, you are supposed to forget — and most probably, they’ll help you in dis-remembering by bombing you again on some or other pretext. Forget 9/11, i.e., September 11, 1973, when the US supported Chile’s military headed by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Dr. Salvadore Allende. Pinochet’s horrific rule lasted till 1990.
- But you are obliged to remember 9/11, i.e., September 11, 2001, when the hijackers crashed two airplanes into Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York killing about 3,000 people, third plane hit the US Defense Department building, the Pentagon, and the fourth one crashed without hitting its target.
The United States only remembers the 9/11 attacks but has dementia when it comes to dozens of its own criminal and violent overt and covert wars with casualties numbering in millions. (See William Blum’s website.) Just the US “war on terror” killed about 1 million people with a cost of $8 trillion.
Nor could you remind Israel and her supporters that Israel is built on stolen Palestinian land. Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion accepted the fact when he told Nahum Goldmann
“If I were an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is normal; we have taken their [Palestinians’] country. It is true God promised it to us, but how could that interest them? Our God [Yahweh] is not theirs [Allah]. There has been Anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They see but one thing: we have come and stolen their country [Palestine]. Why would they accept that?”
Goldmann, a leading Zionist and the founder of World Jewish Congress, lamented the Israeli intransigence when he wrote:
“In 30 years, Israel has never presented the Arabs with a single peace plan. She has rejected every settlement plan devised by her friends and by her enemies. She has seemingly no other object than to preserve the status quo while adding territory piece by piece.”
Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has brought out hatred Jews and their supporters have for the Palestinians and it also displays their willful negation of historical events such as establishing Israel on Palestinian land, Nakba or catastrophe which resulted in forceful eviction and deportation of 700,000 Palestinians, not letting Palestinians to live in peace on the remaining 22% land but either creating settlements on West Bank or turning Gaza into an open air prison, and so on.
Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, and US-Israeli filmmaker Guy Nattiv arranged a showing of a video (a compilation of raw footage by Israeli Defense Force of Hamas attacks) in Los Angeles and New York on November 8, a month and a day after the Hamas attack. By that time Israel had killed over 10,000 Palestinians, including more than 4,000 children. People like Gadot only remember 1,139 Israeli deaths but not Israel’s genocidal spree which had resulted in over eight fold Palestinian deaths, in one month! (The figure reached 33,301 on April 1, 2024, i.e., 30 times. On April 1, Israel killed 7 charity workers of the World Central Kitchen of Jose Andres who were delivering food supplies to Palestinians in Gaza. Andres has suspended the program.)
Bill Maher, an anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian, criticized Obama for “moral equivalency,” that is, Obama not only condemned Hamas but also blamed Israel (here, here, and here 19:42-25:47). In the US, most people are scared of the Israel Lobby and so reminding people of Israel’s crimes is a big no-no. Maher is one of those characters who willingly accepts ignorance because they can’t face reality of constant Israeli bombardment for weeks.
FOX (Farts of Xenophobes) TV had a hypocrite “plagiarist” (see Alexander Cockburn’s scathing letter) Alan Dershowitz on its show where the latter, out of contempt, accused Obama of hating Israel and inciting antisemitism. (Antisemitism has become a handy tool for people like Dershowitz to cover up all of Israel’s heinous crimes.)
Dershowitz assumes too much and blames Obama. He should instead be grateful to Obama, for at least two things, raising free US taxpayers money for Israel from $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion every year for 10 years before leaving office and Obama government’s stoppage of an annual military aid portion of $1.3 billion when Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, was elected (30 June 2012 – 3 July 2013) as Egypt’s president. A year later, Egyptian military assisted protests removed him from power. Morsi died during a trial in 2019. By the way, the US government is supportive of the Egyptian military.
Imagine if Morsi was alive and in power today, there are chances he would have come to Gaza’s rescue — either through pressuring Israel for a ceasefire or opening another front and thus forcing Israel to halt the genocidal war.
Chris Cuomo and some of his team members felt December 14, was a “heavy day” because on that day they watched, in an Israeli consulate, a video of Hamas attack which took him “immediately and deeply into a past trauma” similar to the one he had when he “learned why 9/11 happened.” Cuomo felt more than 22 year old trauma but didn’t feel anything for the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. The day Cuomo relived the decades old trauma, 19,000 Palestinian lives lost had been lost on the 69th day of Israel’s atrocious war.
Shai Davidai, assistant professor at Columbia University, wrote about 1,300 words article on CNN site on November 3, 2023, about how he feels insecure for himself and his family due to protests in favor of the Palestinian people. The only mention in his article about Palestinians is the following:
“I feared not only for the future of innocent Israeli and Palestinian children, but for the future of my family here, in New York City.”
The day, the above article of Davidai was published, 9,000 Palestinians had been murdered, 41% or 3,700 of them were children.
In his article, he writes about the beheading of 40 Israeli babies, without any corroboration. It was not true. Israel and its friends doesn’t miss a chance to falsely malign Hamas or Palestinians.*
Atrocities by US and Israel are regularly given a false facade in the media yet the brutal reality continues to exist that sees the massacre of millions across the globe.
*(Dr. Cochav Elkayam-Levy, a lawyer and political science lecturer at the Hebrew University, the woman behind the false charges of rape against Hamas fighters has been exposed as a liar. In the US, some Republican politicians are being trained to portray Hamas as a “brutal and savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while claiming Israel is fighting “a war for humanity.” Israel is also employing music to show Palestinians as less than human.)
B. R. Gowani can be reached at brgowani@hotmail.com