The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned"
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (WB Yeats, "the Second Coming")
by Rena Grasso
Gaza and the Fate of Humanity
Over 40,402 Palestinians have been murdered. Lancet, a London-based peer reviewed medical journal, estimates that 148,000 is a more likely number. Fifty percent of the Palestinian population in Gaza are under 18 years old. Two-thirds of the 40K people are women and children. More than 2000 children under 2 years old have been murdered by Israel who claims no Palestinians are civilians.
Numbers however don't reveal Israel's sadism and savagery: its June 8th attack on Nuseirat killed 270 Palestinians. Amongst them are members of sixteen-year-old Moman's family. IDF soldiers broke down the door of his home where 14 family members were sheltering against the onslaught. The soldiers enter screaming at the family to divulge weapons. They place black hoods over his grandfather and father's heads and push them onto the floor. They force Yemen, his 12-year-old brother, to strip naked, beat him, and burn cigarettes into his neck. When the family can't produce weapons, they shoot Momen, his aunt, and Yemen. They laugh at and taunt his mother as she pleads for their lives. Momen lost his kidney, part of his liver, his spine was injured so he will never walk. Yemen died on the way to a hospital. (Al-Jazeera)
At dawn, July 1, IDF soldiers storm the house of Muhannad al-Jamal, firing randomly and throwing 5 bombs. Shrapnel pierces Muhannad and his sister's limbs, but his mother, 65-year-old Safiya Hassan Musa al-Jamal, has a large piece of shrapnel deep into her chest. During the 3 hours of relentless bombing, his mother falls unconscious. Finally, the soldiers take Muhannad and his mother onto a tank; Muhannad thinks for medical care. Instead, they throw him and his mother off the tank and back over them. His mother is crushed under its wheels. He manages to escape, but wounded and traumatized by the atrocities.
On July15, during the attack on Shuyaiya neighborhood of Gaza City, Sara Bahar's family, with only bread to eat, was trapped for a week. At 2 am, IDF soldiers bulldozed the door of their dwelling. They set attack dogs on Sara's disabled brother, Muhammad. The soldiers laugh as he screams. His mother pleads for a doctor. The IDF brings in a presumed doctor who takes Muhammad into a back room. The screaming stops. The "doctor" emerges with a smile "as if delivering a message". The soldiers stay for hours eating and drinking before the starving family. They demand women's phones and laugh and mock the pictures. Before they leave, they beat and kick Sara; the men are taken into a room for interrogation, beaten, taken out in detention. The women are evicted from their home. Four days later Muhammad's body is found decomposing in the rubble of their house.
Humans alone are capable of such evil, and history is rife with its manifestations. Six thousand years of Patriarchal "civilization" have delivered class exploitation, slavery, organized warfare, periodic genocides, mass rapes and massacres.
Technology has amplified the scale of death and destruction. World War I ushered in modern high-tech warfare. It stunned the West with its horrors, and influenced Freud to posit Thanatos, humans' death instinct. The League of Nations was born from the atrocities of World War I. But it failed. Two decades later, World War II erupted and the world witnessed an exponential surge in destructiveness and carnage. Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Nazi Holocaust of Jews are iconic testaments to human evil. But equally heinous are the terror bombing campaigns.
In February 1945, the US and the UK orchestrated the "Hiroshima of Germany". For "the sake of increasing terror" (Churchill), their air forces dropped 3600 tons of bombs and incendiary devices on densely populated Dresden, - the "Florence of the Elbe", a city of great artistic and historical importance. Four relentless waves of bombings leveled Dresden; they killed between 25,000 - 35,000, mostly women, children and the elderly.
In March,1945, US generals decided to obliterate Tokyo. The aerial bombing rained 1600 tons of high explosive bombs packed with napalm. The largely wooden city ignited; temperatures reached 1800 degrees; glass melted; people boiled to death in waters where they sought refuge. The death toll was 110,000; the smell of burning human flesh rose into the atmosphere sickening the men in the bombers.
Again, the repugnant evils of war rang alarm bells. They spawned the United Nation and the Geneva Convention against Genocide. We recognized the need to restrain our propensity for irrationality armed with annihilating powers. We established rational principles and institutions to guide and enforce our collective will to life over death.
Israel and the US have destroyed these bulwarks against human evil. They have erased red lines. Viciousness, cruelty, desecration of life, Israel's pathological consciousness and behavior, are sanctioned. The United States has blessed and enabled Israel's depravity. The blood-dimmed tide has been released.
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