Saturday 26 May 2018

Gaza: The Rhythm of Time

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Hello brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, this is Back in the USSR, I am Siegfried and thanks for tuning in.  I want to begin by explaining why I did not do a new show last week.  You might have noticed that I played an older show from last month where I expressed my solidarity with the Palestinian people and in particular the people of the besieged Gaza strip, who at that time were facing lethal violence from the Israeli Army every Friday as they peacefully demonstrated for their rights as a people in the face of a brutal colonial regime.  Those protests began on March 30th and continued until Nakba “Catastrophe” Day, last Tuesday May 15th, when Palestinians mark the hostile takeover of their lands in 1948 by the new Israeli state.  Last Monday, May 14th, the United States, acting in defiance of world opinion as well as international law, opened an embassy in Jerusalem and recognized that city as the undivided capital of Israel in an open assault on Palestinian aspirations for a viable independent state with East Jerusalem as its capital. 

On that same day, the people of Gaza protested once again, and once again, unarmed demonstrators were met by the sniper rifles of the Israeli Army.  62 Palestinians died that day, thus eclipsing the entire death toll since the protests began on March 30th in less than 24 hours.  This was not indiscriminate shooting on the part of the Israeli military.  These are soldiers armed with precision weapons, aiming and deliberately shooting individual unarmed Palestinians through their sniper scopes.  This was cold blooded murder in the fullest sense.  As Michael Parenti said in that opening clip there, this was a clear case of “The Wagon Train vs The Swarthy Hordes”, with the so-called “civilized” Israeli soldiers mowing down the “savage” Palestinians whom they dehumanize, brutalize and murder. 

And of course the Western media also does this when it engages in false balancing and tries to pass of this one-sided colonial massacre in terms of “clashes” or some similar trite phrase that implies both sides are to blame or that the unarmed Palestinian demonstrators were somehow “asking for it” when they were shot.  So you have the New York Times saying on May 14 that “a mass attempt by Palestinians to cross the border fence separating Israel from Gaza turned violent, as Israeli soldiers responded with rifle fire”.  As my friend Greg Shupak has pointed out, this kind of reporting paints “Israel’s rampage as a reaction to a Palestinian provocation”.  That same day, the New York Times editorial board went even further:

Led too long by men who were corrupt or violent or both, the Palestinians have failed and failed again to make their own best efforts toward peace. Even now, Gazans are undermining their own cause by resorting to violence, rather than keeping their protests strictly peaceful.

The mainstream capitalist media blamed the Palestinians for the bloodshed.  With a Yahoo article from May 14th reading “Violent Protests in Gaza Ahead of US Embassy Inauguration in Jerusalem”.  Bloomberg, also on May 14th, “Hamas Targets Fence as Gaza Bloodshed Clouds Embassy Move”.  A BBC report from May 15th that states “Gaza Braced for Further Violent Protests,” similarly blames the Palestinians for the lethal force used again them, effectively accusing them of violence and not their killers.  Business Insider on May 14th: “Palestinian protesters who ramped up their activities along the Gaza strip and, as a result, were targeted by the Israeli army with increasing intensity.” Once again attacking the protestors for throwing rocks and burning tires while the IDF had sniper rifles and tanks that it certainly wasn’t afraid to use against unarmed people.  Unarmed people whom the Washington Post, on May 15th, referred to as being only “nominal civilians”.  To once again quote Greg Shupak, the media portrays the Palestinians as “inherently threatening, intrinsically killable, always suspect, never innocent, permanently guilty of existing”.  It’s truly disgusting.


I couldn’t do my show last week.  In the aftermath of such an atrocity, it was too much for me to handle.  You might have noticed that every week since the Great March of Return began at the end of March, I’ve been naming the dead, naming the individuals shot down in cold blood by the Israeli state.  If I did the show last week, I would have had to name 62 people, 62 individuals with faces, names, lives and stories to tell, and I just couldn’t do it.  Instead, I went to the Guelph Poetry Slam at the E-Bar in downtown Guelph, I used to be a regular there, but it had been at least two years since I last attended an event like that.  I got up in front of everyone and performed the following poem by an Irish Republican hunger-striker who gave his life for his people in a British jail in 1981, and I did it for Palestine just as Bobby Sands himself would have wanted me to if he was still with us now.  It’s called “The Rhythm of Time”:

(Read “The Rhythm of Time” by Bobby Sands)

(Eire Og – “Sunday Bloody Sunday”)

You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  Now there have been some interesting developments that have emerged in the wake of this latest atrocity against the people of Gaza.  Notably the UN has launched an extremely belated investigation into Israeli war crimes.  In many ways they had no choice.  Even with the atrocious quality of Western media coverage, the whole world was outraged by what the Israeli Army did and is continuing to do, because the protests have continued.  On Friday May 25th, the Ministry of Health in Gaza reported 109 people injured by Israeli sniper fire while another man, 24 year old Yasser Sami Habib, died of the wounds he sustained in last week’s protests.  Thus he became the 67th victim of the May 14th massacre, the 5th person out of the more than 2,000 injured that day to succumb to their injuries.  Now, as commentators have pointed out with regard to previous Israeli assaults on Gaza, the Israeli arms industry is one of the largest in the world and it continues to literally make a killing off of the Israeli Apartheid state’s repression of Palestinians – testing out new weapon systems and then marketing them as “battle-tested” to other countries.  I’m going to play a recent report from the Real News that gets into that.  But first, I want to emphasize the growing level of international solidarity for the Palestinian cause.  Protests in support of Gaza have occurred around the world, we had some significant ones happening around here in Toronto and Waterloo.  And, very notably, a new Gaza Freedom Flotilla of activists has just set sail and will be attempting to run the Israeli sea blockade on Gaza in the near future.  I want to play a report on that first:



You’re listening to Back in the USSR.  I’ve talked a lot about atrocities on this show, but the growing solidarity with Palestine, with the BDS movement in particular, is cause for hope.  In addition to that we’ve just seen some real democratic victories for the people, happening in several countries.  In Ireland, the Irish people just voted overwhelmingly to overturn the constitutional ban on abortion, a massive victory for women’s rights, and when I say overwhelming I really mean it: urban, rural, young, middle-aged, even relatively old people, major majorities across virtually every demographic according to exit polls in what amounts to a cultural revolution in a historically Catholic and socially conservative country.  Just amazing. 

I also want to talk very briefly about the recent decision by Donald Trump to walk away from upcoming negotiations with North Korea.  Now that, needless to say, is not a democratic victory for the people: the DPRK has ended missile tests, demolished its one and only nuclear test site, and engaged in meaningful dialogue with South Korea.  The U.S. response has been to continue with ongoing wargames simulating an invasion of North Korea, deploy nuclear capable B-52 bombers to the region, and say they want to impose a “Libya Model” on the DPRK – ie. Invade the country and kill its leader, like what was done with the NATO assault on Libya in 2011, a country that had voluntarily disarmed, given up its nuclear program and made a deal with the West.  It didn’t save it in the end.  But the real democratic victory here, against all the threats and imperialist sabre-rattling, is the solidarity of the Korean people.  The Korean people want peace.  Overwhelmingly.  They want peace, a peace treaty, a conclusive end to the Korean War, over 85% of South Korean support the process, and they are not going to permit Donald Trump or anyone to ruin it for them.  This is their land, and they are determined to exercise their self-determination as a people – both north and south.  So the Kim Jong-Un and Moon Jae-In met again today in defiance of the U.S. and once again pledged their commitment to a made-in-Korea peace process.  I have every confidence they will succeed.  As Thomas Sankara used to say, "When the people stand up, imperialism trembles".  This is what journalist Tim Shorrock had to say about this on the Real News:


Michael Parenti – Rambo and the Swarthy Hordes

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