Blog 15 – An Article titled Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas
07.12.2023
When the Ku Klux Klan would go on a punitive raid, anyone in the settler colony, who questioned the reason given for the planned burning down of black people’s houses and hanging black men by ropes around their necks in trees, by asking, say, “Are you sure it is true?” – a rape, a decapitation, spine-chilling murders reportedly committed with glee – or anyone who questioned whether the intended victims of the punitive raid were those, in fact, responsible for the rape, decapitation or murders, by asking, say, – “Are those the people responsible for these crimes?” would immediately be closed down. “You are supporting the terrorists!”, they would be told. Of course they did not use the word “terrorist”, but that is what they meant. They used the “n-word”. Each epoch has its name for “the witch”. What this word, whichever it was, meant and still apparently means, was that the crime is so beyond the pale that no ordinary human response could supposedly deal with it – not the police, nor the Courts, nor the jails, for a start. Only the Klan could and then would deal with it. If anyone said, but “What if the crime didn’t happen like that? Or didn’t happen at all?” or “But, hang on a second, the people you are killing are not the ones who committed that crime, if indeed a crime happened,” you just get told to shut up. “How dare you just stand there and refuse to criticize the rape, decapitation or murder of one of ours! Say it: Say you abhor the actions of those ‘terrorists’! and say it now!”
Anyway, the point is that the Ku Klux Klan gets to go burn down a church, a village, and kill people.
Every colony had the same ability to shut down opposition, within its ranks, to a punitive raid. Every settler colony had settlers who would just go burn down a village, wipe out a town. Others in the society lost the freedom of expression to question the truth of the facts, the reasonableness of the vengeance, the proportionality of the punishment, or even the guilt of those being targeted.
Every colony also had the potential to shut down opposition even to outright genocide. And most colonies did use this power to silence those opposing the genocide. Only now, for example, is Canada, as a society, allowing anyone to speak up and speak out about the theft of the children of First Nations from their parents’ homes, the incarceration of the children in faraway jails called schools and, for many of the children, their death.
Does all this give Americans pause for some thought?
Punitive raids and genocides are perpetrated inevitably by people claiming to be, themselves, the “victims” of abhorrent crimes, crimes so awful that the people allegedly committing them cannot be treated as human. Then, it somehow becomes socially unacceptable for anyone in that society to question the veracity of the crime, who the perpetrator actually was, or the link between the supposed perpetrator and the target of the punitive raid. All rational explanations go overboard.
The German genocide in Namibia was justified by stories of a spate of rape and murder cases supposedly committed by the indigenous people. No need to enquire what happened, who did it, nor to arrest anyone, let alone charge them, allow them to respond to rational charges, and then to decide on their guilt or not, and if guilty, on their sentence. The perpetrator “victims” are so “righteous” they do not need normal due process. They can just go kill people.
Nazi Germany, yes, even that lot, were supposedly “victims”. They glorified their own “victimhood”. Hitler could whip up a frenzy of hatred of “communists” and “Jews” and communists who were Jews, and Jews who were communists, all because they had supposedly “stabbed Germany in the back” by rebelling against the ruling class at the bitter end of the 1914-18 War. “The enemy” were quickly turned into something else. They were no longer Germans with a different opinion from the Nazis, nor even were they Germans of a different religion or culture, but they were “anti-Germans”, and later “sub-Germans” and then, the ultimate stage, “sub-humans”. Then, the genocide can begin.
And you cannot speak against it without being accused of supporting the equivalent of today’s “terrorist”. Importantly you cannot speak in defense of the people being sent to concentration camps, or even extermination camps, without prefacing all comments with the words, “I firstly denounce the communists and the Jews for stabbing Germany in the back.” You have to hold that opinion, and you have to make that statement. Or else! That is the pattern.
Look what happens now in colonial Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians of Gaza.
The genocide is, as everyone knows, funded by and supported by and armed by the United States of America. So, even in the USA, it being joined at the hip to Israel, free speech is now closed down, as it was in the days of the Klan and in settler colonial days. Exactly, the same.
Leader of the Progressive Caucus in the US Congress Pramila Jayapal can be forced by an otherwise normal-seeming CNN journalist Dana Bash to say the words that Dana Bash wants her to say, prefacing everything about the Israeli state annihilating the Palestinian people, with the words, “I deplore Hamas actions like rape on 7 October,” even when the Congresswoman has, again and again, bowing to the settler-colony insistence upon it, deplored Hamas’ actions.
When Representative Jayapal says, reasonably enough, this rape, assuming it happened, does not justify the Israeli military killing 15,000 civilians, who incidentally did not commit this rape, then Bash asks her this remarkable question, “But we don’t see Israeli soldiers raping Palestinian women?” Talk about the loony mentality of the settler-colony monopoly on thought processes! What kind of an argument is that?
And another “worst” example of settler-colony justification for genocide, was when the editor-in-chief of the prominent eLife magazine re-tweeted an article published on the satirical website Onion, under the telling heading, “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”. The title says it all. Anyway, the settler-colony Israel, which now seems an integral part of the settler colony the USA, says “No! You can’t retweet that!” So, the bosses of this highly respected editor, Michael Eisen, who happens to be Jewish and to have family from Israel, gets fired from his work. Yes, fired. A petition with thousands of signatures protesting this dismissal from work, has, as far as we know, not yet led to the dismissal being rescinded. The title of that article is so apt: “Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”. It is worth looking up and reading the article. It is only about 200 words long.
The reaction to this article is really much the same reaction anyone would get if they challenged the Ku Klux Klan on its intent, its plan and its execution of collective punishment on a black American cluster of houses. If you criticize the punitive raid, this means you agree with the, often only alleged, misdeed. And its effect is that a rational response, within the norms of ordinary human decency, and even within the norms of existing legal frameworks for dealing with crime, no longer operate. It is the “What else can we do to stop this happening again and again?” rhetorical question that ensues. And sure enough Dana Bash came up with that, too, in her interview with Ms. Jayapal.
There is a lot the USA can do, as it turns out. It can put conditions on its military aid to Israel. It can cut its arms supplies. It can put conditions that Israel respect international law or no more money. It can make conditions that Israel withdraw from the Palestinian territory it has occupied illegally for over 50 years, and lift its Medieval siege on Gaza, and it can call for the ICC to investigate crimes against humanity by not just Hamas and other Palestinian groups, but also by the IDF, and by the USA, itself, for transparency’s sake, for supplying the arms for the IDF crimes, and for the ICC to investigate Israel for genocide. That is what the USA could do instead of green-lighting Israel’s genocide being perpetrated on the Palestinian people.
Lindsey Collen
for LALIT
