JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”
– Yoav Gallant, Israel Defense Minister
+ You won’t have to interrogate them afterward. They’re explicit about the war crimes they’re planning to commit.
+ On Friday, the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, doubled down on the idea of collective punishment on the eve of a ground offensive, claiming there were no “innocent” Gazans and that all who remain (and, really, where can they go?) should pay the retributive price for Hamas’ attacks: “It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians unaware, uninvolved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’etat.”
+ When you declare total war against Gaza, which has been under perpetual siege since 1967 after being seized by Israel during the Six Day War, what is it you’re going to war against? There are no airbases, no army bases, no tank battalions, no air defense systems, no naval ports, no oil refineries, no rail system, no troop barracks, no armored personnel carriers, no howitzers, no satellite systems, no attack helicopters, no fighter jets, no anti-tank batteries, no submarines, no command-and-control centers. Just people, most of them women and kids. It’s why the entire population must be dehumanized, turned into “human animals” whose lives don’t matter.
+ According to Johannes Steizinger, “human animals” was a term frequently used by the Nazi race theorists about Jews, Slavs, gypsies, and blacks, who held that “only some groups of people “groups of people meet the metaphysical criterion of being human. Members of these groups are considered as essentially and hence fully human. However, other groups are reduced to the biological sense of being human. They simply lack the metaphysical essence of humanity and are thus characterized as human animals. These creatures are human only from the naturalistic point of view, but not human from a metaphysical point of view. Thus, they are regarded as subhumans who are not fully human.” (Johnannes Steizinger, The Significance of Dehumanization: Nazi Ideology and Its Psychological Consequences, 2018.)
+ The reaction in the US to Hamas’s attacks was more hysterical, the calls for ultra-violence more grotesque, and the lack of dissent more uniform, than in Israel itself (which is saying something because Netanyahu blustered this week that “Every member of Hamas is a dead man”)…
+ Joe Biden controls the flow of money and arms to Israel and is one of the few global figures who could have exerted some restraint on Netanyahu’s vows to destroy Gaza as we know it. Instead, he played his customary role, one he has perfected over the last 40 years, of an enabler for the Apartheid State’s worst impulses. Biden stifled any voices inside his administration urging a ceasefire, doomed as those lonely calls may have been, and instead pledged “unwavering” support for an Israel regime that has consistently ridiculed him and repeatedly flouted modest requests that it curtail the violent encroachment of Israeli settlements into the West Bank. While Biden expressed condolences to the families of the Israeli dead and wounded, he said nothing about the Palestinian families in the confined ghetto of Gaza, whose neighborhoods were being pulverized by Israeli airstrikes financed by the US.
+ A handful of Democratic lawmakers, led by Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush and Andre Carson, have called for a ceasefire. They’ve been swiftly rebuked by the Biden White House. In a press briefing on Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre fumed: “I’ve seen some of those statements this weekend. We’re going to continue to be very clear. We believe they are wrong. We believe they’re repugnant and we believe they’re disgraceful.”
+ Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley is considered one of the most reasonable of the current crop of Republicans. “Finish them.” Genocide is now her campaign theme.
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