On 29 February 2024, Israeli soldiers machine-gunned crowds of Palestinians in north Gaza while they stood waiting for food to arrive. Something between 80 and 200 Gazans were killed and hundreds are wounded. "How can this still be possible?" a friend wrote in an email sent to me at 02:19 hrs. "You mean, how come our 'democracies' have not responded to calls, based on our purported shared values, to stop it?" I replied.
Some cannot help but feel that the Australian government, and all those governments allied with US-NATO, are in the hands of career criminals, who would not be out of place in a mafia series like Gomorra, providing weapons to thugs and sadists exerting revenge on their behalf to people who had stood up to their rotten masters. Democratic debate only just limps along in the Australian Parliament, with the Parliamentary Support Group for Julian Assange, after multiple attempts, just managing to drag a majority, which finally included Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, into supporting a motion for ending Julian Assange's imprisonment, led by Andrew Wilkie, on 14 February 2024. We know the names of those who voted against this too. And, in the Australian Senate, on 28 February 2024, in Matters of Urgency, Israel, Senators David Shoebridge of the Greens, called on the Government to stop sending arms to fuel Israel's genocidal strategy to remove the Palestinians - or words to that effect. Greens Senators Janet Rice, Senator Allman-Payne, and Jordan Steele-Johns supported Shoebridge in the debate. Senator Bragg (NSW Liberals) and Senator Ciccone (Victorian Liberals) attempted to defend the Government's foreign policy. It was argued by those defending foreign policy that Australia does not export arms, and that Hamas 'started it' and was genocidal towards Israelis, who were defending their state. The other side argued that both Liberals and Labor in Australia have endorsed the idea of becoming one of the worlds top ten arms manufacturers, Australia documentably exports 'parts' of arms for reassembly elsewhere, that Israel is conducting genocide against Palestinians and that tens of thousands of Australians demonstrate against this every week.
Chilling parallels between the suffering of Julian Assange and Gaza civilians
As Tarik Cyril Amar writes, there are
"Chilling parallels between the suffering of Julian Assange and Gaza civilians. By locking away one journalist and abetting the misery of an entire people, the West combines oppressive structure with disregard for law."
[...] The essence of [Assange's] political persecution – in reality, there is no good-faith legal case – is simple: Through his WikiLeaks platform, Assange published leaked materials that exposed the brutality, criminality, and lies of the US’ and UK’s (and, more generally, the West’s) post-9/11 wars. While leaking state secrets is not legal – although it can be morally obligatory and even heroic, as in the case of Chelsea Manning, who was a major WikiLeaks source – publishing the results of such leaks is legal. Indeed, that principle is an acknowledged pillar of media freedom and independence. Without it, media cannot fulfil any kind of watchdog function. Yet Washington is obstinately and absurdly trying to treat Assange as a spy. If it succeeds, “global media freedom” (for what it’s worth…) is toast.
This is what makes Assange objectively the single most important political prisoner in the world." https://www.rt.com/news/593422-assange-gaza-west-disregard-law/
In the article quoted above, Amar describes Assange's persecution and the Gaza massacres as both standing for a "plethora of political pathologies, including merciless cruelty, politicized “justice,” mass media disinformation, and, last but not least, that old specialty of the “garden” West, peak hypocrisy." And of that "grotesquely arrogant American sense of global entitlement" to get whatever it wants at any cost, moral, truth, order, financial, in blood and land, a holocaust for Gazans, and the rendition of Assange, who is an Australian, to America's imperial Aztec altar [my words].
He goes on to compare the morally declining chaotic west with a mad but functioning Nazi Germany. Citing Ernst Fraenkel on the Third Reich, he describes a state that can still function, despite its inner chaos, because it is both a state that still has laws (if often very unjust ones) and a state that imposes measures, free of legal restraint.
When are they coming for the rest of us?
[To compare the west with Nazi Germany is:] "Shocking? Of course. Far-fetched? Those who keep telling themselves that are in for a very rude awakening if they ever find themselves where both the Palestinians and Assange are, in their different ways: On the very dark side of what is probably the most dishonest and unreliable political order on the globe at this point."
We have heard the lessons so often that they have become sing-song cliches for many: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” (John Stuart Mill.) Then there is the famous, "First they came [for the socialists]," poem by German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984). It needs a couple more verses:
Then they came for the journalists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a journalist.
Then they came for the Palestinians, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Palestinian.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
Israeli troops gun down thousands of Palestinians awaiting aid in north Gaza
"Israeli soldiers on 29 February opened heavy machine-gun fire towards thousands of Palestinian citizens in the northern Gaza Strip who were awaiting the arrival of humanitarian aid on Al-Rashid Street.
No official death toll is yet available; nevertheless, local reports say anywhere between 80 and 200 Gazans were killed during the latest Israeli massacre. The number of wounded reportedly raised into the hundreds, with most being transferred to the barely-functioning Shifa Hospital. Read more at https://thecradle.co/articles/israeli-troops-gun-down-thousands-of-palestinians-awaiting-aid-in-north-gaza
Add comment