Henry Siegman, writing for Haaretz:
When I managed to get over the shock of that exchange, it struck me that the invocation of the Hitler era was actually a frighteningly apt and searing analogy, although not the one my friend intended. A million and a half civilians have been forced to live in an open-air prison in inhuman conditions for over three years now, but unlike the Hitler years, they are not Jews but Palestinians. Their jailers, incredibly, are survivors of the Holocaust, or their descendants. Of course, the inmates of Gaza are not destined for gas chambers, as the Jews were, but they have been reduced to a debased and hopeless existence.
Fully 80% of Gaza’s population lives on the edge of malnutrition, depending on international charities for their daily nourishment. According to the UN and World Health authorities, Gaza’s children suffer from dramatically increased morbidity that will affect and shorten the lives of many of them. This obscenity is a consequence of a deliberate and carefully calculated Israeli policy aimed at de-developing Gaza by destroying not only its economy but its physical and social infrastructure while sealing it hermitically from the outside world.
Particularly appalling is that this policy has been the source of amusement for some Israeli leaders, who according to Israeli press reports have jokingly described it as “putting Palestinians on a diet.” That, too, is reminiscent of the Hitler years, when Jewish suffering amused the Nazis.
This might sound a strange thing to say but let’s not delude ourselves, the disaster in Haiti is largely a man-made one. And it’s down to the usual suspects:
Haiti is routinely described as the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”. This poverty is the direct legacy of perhaps the most brutal system of colonial exploitation in world history, compounded by decades of systematic postcolonial oppression.
Decades of neoliberal “adjustment” and neo-imperial intervention have robbed its government of any significant capacity to invest in its people or to regulate its economy.
It is this poverty and powerlessness that account for the full scale of the horror in Port-au-Prince today. Since the late 1970s, relentless neoliberal assault on Haiti’s agrarian economy has forced tens of thousands of small farmers into overcrowded urban slums.
As one commenter notes:
Now is exactly the time to inject some realism into the discourse. I’ve been reading/listening to reports from the Western media, and they are full of revisions and distortions concerning our historical role there. ‘Haiti is a failed state,’ ‘Aristide ‘fled,’ was ‘forced out by a rebellion,’ etc., ignoring the deliberate campaign of destabilisation and coup d’etat against the democratically elected government in 2004.
Religion-free ways to donate to the relief effort:
To donate to the relief effort in a religion-free way and help counter the scandalous myth that only the religious care about their fellow-humans you can donate at SHARE or Non-Believers Giving Aid.
Open letter from the Camp for Climate Action to Ian Thomas, the Chief Superintendent of the Metropolitan Police Service. Worth reading in it’s entirety.
The Guardian: ‘Memoirs to reveal Dick Cheney thought Bush had gone soft on war on terror.’ Who knows what dark place we’d all be in if this man had become U.S. President.
Family of Ian Tomlinson — who died after being hit by policeman at G20 protests — speak out.
Neda Agha-Soltan is a young women from Iran who was shot dead while protesting against repression in Iran. She has a page on Wikipedia. Photos and video and of her death have been widely broadcast by the Western media, with copious amounts of faux sympathy. She deserves our sympathy because she appears to be a…
Sign and send a mesage: freeezra.org Join Naomi Klein, Neve Gordon, Noam Chomsky and thousands of others and tell Israel not to jail Ezra Nawi, one of Israel’s most courageous human rights activists. His crime? He tried to stop a military bulldozer from destroying the homes of Palestinian Bedouins in the South Hebron region. Nawi, a…
G20 protests: how the image of UK police took a beating: It has been a bad month for the thin blue line … it’s no wonder that senior officers this weekend are calling a series of crisis meetings. But they may already be too late. Public opinion appears to be turning against Britain’s police. Just…
Growing catalogue of G20 protest videos showing the UK police running amok.
The new UK regulations that mandate the tracking of all your telephone calls and email. It certainly makes me feel safe to have a party of war criminals and their police force tracking every citizen’s communications (including whistle-blowers and journalists).