People – we really need to leap ahead this leap year in stopping the crimes of our government. Please use this extra day to speak out, educate others, take action. This Saturday there are world-wide actions for Palestine including demonstrations around the U.S. Find one near you and participate.
Our last message asked whether it was “over the top” to show UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield with bloody hands as she posted the single VETO on the UN Security Council’s consideration of a ceasefire for Gaza. (We didn’t include the altered image; now it follows.)
The evidence of bloody hands is overwhelming, though. “Life draining out of Gaza at terrifying speed,” said the chief of UN Aid Martin Griffiths on the more than 100 Palestinians killed today while seeking food. Israel has used more bomb tonnage on Gaza in four months than the U.S. used in Iraq in the whole U.S. war. NPR and The New York Times, both of which have maintained months of extreme “even-handedness” to favor Israel in their reportage, have published accounts of peoples’ suffering in Gaza. See, for example, Megan Stack in the Times: Starvation Is Stalking Gaza’s Children:
The threat of starvation is believed to be most intense in the bomb-scarred remains of northern Gaza, where by January, nutrition screenings found that more than 15 percent of children ages 6 months to 23 months were acutely malnourished, a condition rarely seen in Gaza before the current war. “Such a decline in a population’s nutritional status in three months is unprecedented globally,” UNICEF, the World Health Organization and the U.N. World Food Program said in reporting the latest grim statistics last week.
Or this largely untold story from Eyder Peralta at NPR: As Gaza strains under a food crisis, some Israeli protesters are trying to block aid:
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip,” Israel’s Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said. “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly. This is the ISIS of Gaza.”
So, yes, in the service of confronting truth, the bloody hands are appropriately depicted.
Lyle Jeremy Rubin, the former U.S. Marine who has been speaking against U.S. wars for years as a presenter for We Are Not Your Soldiers, wrote this week on the U.S. airman who self-immolated outside the Israeli Embassy on Sunday, Taking Aaron Bushnell at His Word (and Deed):
“…I doubt that Bushnell would have wanted us to follow in his footsteps—at least not by dousing ourselves in gasoline before a sad and enraged farewell. But he no doubt was counting on us—and not just us service members or vets—to convey and make use of the sadness and rage in our own ways. In manners that burn and last. Beyond the man-made firestorms in Gaza. Beyond the all-encompassing fire.”
Earlier this month, We Are Not Your Soldiers made a visit to three classes in a NYC high school where we were requested to model critical reading of a newspaper article on Gaza. This was a new experience for us. We sought answers to questions raised by the students and shared resource materials.
