Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

So far, Israel has:

• bombed 3 UN schools being used as refugee centres, killing dozens of civilians. An entire family of seven children perished in one of the raids. The UN had given the Israeli army the GPS coordinates of the schools and told them they were being used as refugee centres, after the Israelis themselves had told these people to leave their homes.

• shot at a UN convoy, bringing aid to Palestinian civilians. The driver of a lorry was killed.

• interfered with Red Cross workers trying to help victims of the violence. In one now notorious incident, the Israeli army left several Palestinian children inside a house to starve at the side of their mothers’ corpses. When the Red Cross wanted to search for further victims in the bombed out houses, they were told to leave the area by the Israeli army.

And today, reports reach the world that Israel evacuated around 110 civilians to a building on the 4th of January, and then proceeded to bomb it the next day. 30 people were killed, including a 5 month old baby.

The UN security council accepted a resolution today, calling for a lasting solution to the conflict and unfettered access to the wounded for relief workers. The US actually abstained from the vote. I suppose we should be grateful they didn’t veto it.

It didn’t really matter in the end, of course, because both Israel and Hamas blew off the resolution.

The scale of the Israeli disregard for international law does at least seem to have invoked the ire of at least some at the UN and all of those engaged in helping the victims of the conflict. There are now calls to investigate whether Israel is guilty of war crimes (yeah, I wonder), but let’s not cheer too soon. No-one who cares currently has the political clout to actually make such an investigation go ahead and western reporters still aren’t allowed into Gaza.

While I’m venting my spleen, I mustn’t fail to recognise the cowardly inaction of the Dutch government, who have so far defended Israel with the usual has-the-right-to-defend-itself nonsense, which is intended — and serves — to distract and deflect attention from the atrocities being perpetrated. A lot of people understandably find the notion of self-defence a reasonable one, but what is happening today in Gaza has little to do with defence. Clearly, in the eyes of Israel, the only good Palestinian is a dead one.

The title of this entry lacks any subtlety, but the strength of the statement accurately conveys my feelings towards the government of the state of Israel.

There are no words to describe my disgust for the actions of this rogue state, governed by villains and cowards who have repeatedly shown themselves to be bereft of all human decency and empathy. Loveless sociopaths, the lot of them.

I feel similarly about Israel’s puppet-master, the US, which funds the israeli military and supports Israel’s apartheid regime, human rights abuses and countless war crimes and atrocities. Expect more of the same from Saint Obama, who has pledged his support for ally Israel many times. A vote for Obama was a vote for Olmert.

The new 3 hour per day ceasefire is a bad joke. Relief workers say they can’t even begin to make a dent in the mountain of human misery that Israel has already caused, utilising such a brief window. And even that 3 hour window wasn’t instituted until the US finally relented and put pressure on Israel to make a gesture of goodwill after it shelled UN schools in the Gaza Strip.

What country shells UN schools, for crying out loud? Do you see any of the so-called axis of evil states doing that? No, there’s only one nation that would dare do such a thing, secure in the knowledge that it is virtually exempt from the international laws that govern the behaviour of other countries. As long as its lord and master, that other notorious rogue state and the greatest threat to world stability, the USA, continues to apply one law to Israel and another to the rest of the world, Israel need fear nothing from the international community.

Don’t talk to me about Hamas and the need to stop the shelling of Israeli towns across the border. Nothing justifies the actions and tactics that Israel employs, which is one of the reasons the country is so reviled in the first place. Israel is the engine in the anti-semitic machine. It’d be funny if it weren’t so sad.