Michael Parenti – The Wagon Train vs The Swarthy Hordes
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
No comments:
Post a Comment