Democracy Now recently interviewed two US doctors who have just returned from working in a hospital in Gaza. The interview includes photos and video of their patients.
The injuries are horrific, made more horrific by the lack of medicines and equipment.
Children’s bodies mangled with shrapnel from cluster bombs and debris are hard to forget.
“If I worked 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, it would be less than a drop in the ocean of what is needed,” one doctor said.
Please, don’t turn away from these mangled, young bodies. They are being shredded and killed by American weaponry purchased with our tax dollars.
Genocides proceed, in part, because regular people turn away.
You know the old maxim, “If you want something done right, then do it yourself.”
Or, if you can’t do it all by yourself, then connect with a powerhouse group of dear friends who all share a common vision and do it together. It’s a lot more fun that way to work with highly competent friends who all want to work for the same goals.
This is the origin story of a new group that I am a part of that is creating a new podcast dealing with the violent, tragic — now genocidal — relationship existing between Israel and the Palestinian people.
The group’s name is “Christian Forum on Israel-Palestine.” Posted below is our first video were we introduce ourselves and briefly explain what we hope to accomplish in the coming months.
We are currently making arrangements to interview an important Israeli historian and activist (I will keep his name a secret for now) who will offer an insightful, vital introduction to the history of Israeli-Palestinian violence.
If you want to know who he is, then be sure to subscribe and come back!
I urge you to visit our YouTube page and press the subscribe button. You will not want to miss any upcoming conversations.
Here is the channel’s official description:
This channel promotes understanding about Israel-Palestine, by hosting conversations with scholars, activists, and people directly affected by events in the Holy Land. Each episode elevates an important voice, explores contrasting perspectives, and shares insights that we think are urgently needed. We want to challenge stereotypes, dismantle barriers, and humanize everyone involved. Rather than defend a single narrative, we encourage critical thinking and informed engagement with the complexities of Israel-Palestine. Join us as we imagine for the Muslims, Jews, and Christians of Israel-Palestine a future based on justice, equality, anddignity.
The Rev. Dr. Munther Isaac is the pastor of the Bethlehem Evangelical Lutheran Christmas church. He is also a professor at Bethlehem Bible College.
This Christmas Eve, he delivered a power prophetic, gospel-inspired message directed at the western Christian church.
As the Gaza Strip is demolished, its people massacred, and ethnic cleansing continues unabated throughout the West Bank, far too many US evangelicals approve of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
As pastor Isaac says, “Silence is complicity.” Yes, too many remain silent, but even more damnable are the “Christian” voices raised in support of Israel’s war against Gaza because, some how or another, this slaughter is preparing the way for the return of Christ.
There are three things that I know with certainty about following Jesus. Walking with Christ never requires us to sanction, much less to embrace, ignorance, prejudice or bloodshed.
Those now approving of Israel’s genocide are committing all three of these inexcusable sins.
The following clip of Rev. Isaac’s message is 17 minutes long. Please take the time to listen to it in full. We all need to listen, lament, repent, and become activists for peace and justice in the name of Jesus Christ. We can begin by calling for a ceasefire in Gaza:
The following clip is a 12 minute interview with pastor Isaac broadcast by Democracy Now. Listen to him explain how the Palestinian people feel abandoned by the world, the Palestinian church abandoned by their western brothers and sisters. Remember — Gazan churches are being bombed; Gazan Christians are being murdered along with everyone else.
Have we no compassion for the Arabic-speaking family of God trambling in terror, huddled in the ruins of bombed out churches, desperately praying for God’s deliverance?
That’s the common question we usually ask ourselves when watching a movie like “Schindler’s List,” the academy award winning film about one man’s efforts to rescue Jews from Hilter’s gas chambers.
Schindler risked his life to save others. And he was not the only one.
Others such as the Dutch woman, Corrie Ten Boom, broke the law by hiding Jews inside their homes, risking their freedom while trying to rescue people like Anne Frank, who hid in her neighbor’s attic.
Even though the majority of German church pastors supported the Nazi regime, there was a small minority of faithful ministers of the gospel who eventually lost their freedom because they would not remain silent in the face of Nazi criminality.
Books like Defying Hitler tell the stories of the many ways in which ordinary people in Nazi Germany said No, refusing to march with the majority who refused to speak up or to act out against the wanton atrocities unfolding around them.
Which, again, raises the question, What would I have done?
Would I have remained inactive and silent? Or would I have spoken up, protested, or used whatever means I had at my disposal to work against the genocide and save whomever I could?
Now we all know the answers to those questions. We don’t have to wait any longer.
We are living in a unique moment of history. For a real genocide, a horrendous program of ethnic cleansing is now occuring before our eyes.
Though the American/Western mainstream media gives it all scant attention, anyone with a wider bandwidth of human interest can watch the scandalous, ugly images of daily attrocities as they unfold in real time.
Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, The Electronic Intifada, The Gray Zone, and the Katie Halper Show (among others) are thankfully offering the news coverage that corporate America does not want us to see.
And that news is shockingly repetitious. For what Israel is now doing in Gaza and the West Bank “is a textbook case of genocide.” Those are not my words but the words of Craig Mokhiber, formerly the Director of the New York Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights.
Mr. Mokhiber is the former director because he recently resigned from his position at the United Nations over its efforts to censor his reports on Israel’s attrocities in Gaza.
As a result, Mokhiber ranks among the heroes with Mr. Schindler and Corrie Ten Boom for doing what he could to speak out, protest, and even to hinder the genocide unfolding before our eyes.
He has shown us how he answers the question, “What would I have done?”
It is all too easy to cast ourselves as heroes in our own imaginations, especially when we have no contemporary circumstances to offer us an immediate heroic option.
So, I always imagine myself the hero. But today I do not need to imagine anything. I can face the evidence squarely by looking at my actions today.
What am I doing today to protest, to act, to work against the textbook case of genocide now being written in the pages of modern history with Palestinian blood?
This is the answer for both you and me.
If I am doing nothing to defend Palestinian life today, then that’s what I would have done to defend Anne Frank — nothing.
If I am doing nothing to protest the genocide now occurring in Gaza, then I would have remained silent as I inhaled the stench of Auschwitz.
We can all go to bed tonight knowing that we have answered the perpetually troubling moral question: What would I have done?
Greg Khalil is a Palestinian American who is also a graduate of Yale Law School. In the early 2000s he was a negotiator with the Palestinian team talking with Israeli negotiators about peace in Israeli-Palestine.
Drawing from his family background and his own first-hand experience, Greg discusses the history of Gaza, Hamas, the American church, and possible pathways forward towards an end to the current bloodshed.
In his latest article for Consortium News, veteran journalist Chris Hedges gets the story exactly right when describing Israel’s genocidal plans for
Chris Hedges
both Gaza and the West Bank.
When a sociopath like Bibi Netanyahu (and members of his coalition government) repeatedly tell you that he/they plan to murder you and steal your home, it’s best to take them at their word.
Below is an excerpt of the article titled “Israel’s Final Solution.”
I covered the birth of Jewish fascism in Israel. I reported on the extremist Meir Kahane, who was barred from running for office and whose Kach Party was outlawed in 1994 and declared a terrorist organization by Israel and the United States.
I attended political rallies held by Benjamin Netanyahu, who received lavish funding from rightwing Americans, when he ran against Yitzhak Rabin, who was negotiating a peace settlement with the Palestinians. Netanyahu’s supporters chanted “Death to Rabin.” They burned an effigy of Rabin dressed in a Nazi uniform. Netanyahu marched in front of a mock funeral for Rabin.
Prime Minister Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995, by a Jewish fanatic. Rabin’s widow, Lehea, blamed Netanyahu and his supporters for her husband’s murder.
His father, Benzion — who worked as an assistant to the Zionist pioneer Vladimir Jabotinsky, whom Benito Mussolini referred to as “a good fascist” — was a leader in the Herut Party that called on the Jewish state to seize all the land of historic Palestine.
Many of those who formed the Herut Party carried out terrorist attacks during the 1948 war that established the state of Israel. Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Sidney Hook and other Jewish intellectuals, described the Herut Party in a statement published in The New York Times as a “political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to Nazi and Fascist parties.”
There has always been a strain of Jewish fascism within the Zionist project. Now it has taken control of the Israeli state.
“The left is no longer capable of overcoming the toxic ultra-nationalism that has evolved here,” Zeev Sternhell, a Holocaust survivor and Israel’s foremost authority on fascism, warned in 2018, “the kind whose European strain almost wiped out a majority of the Jewish people.” Sternhell added, “[W]e see not just a growing Israeli fascism but racism akin to Nazism in its early stages.”
The decision to obliterate Gaza has long been the dream of Israel’s crypto-fascists, heirs of Kahane’s movement. These Jewish extremists, which make up the ruling coaltion government, are orchestrating the genocide in Gaza, where hundreds of Palestinians are dying daily. They champion the iconography and language of their homegrown fascism. Jewish identity and Jewish nationalism are the Zionist versions of blood and soil.
Jewish supremacy is sanctified by God, as is the slaughter of the Palestinians, who Netanyahu compared to the Biblical Amalekites, massacred by the Israelites. Enemies — usually Muslims — slated for extinction are subhuman who embody evil. Violence and the threat of violence are the only forms of communication those outside the magical circle of Jewish nationalism understand. Millions of Muslims and Christians, including those with Israeli citizenship, are to be purged.
A leaked 10-page document from the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence dated Oct. 13 recommends the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.3 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.
It is a grave mistake not to take the blood curdling calls for the wholesale eradication and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians seriously. This rhetoric is not hyperbolic. It is a literal prescription. Netanyahu in a tweet, later removed, described the battle with Hamas as a “struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.”
These Jewish fanatics have begun their version of the final solution to the Palestinian problem. They dropped 12,000 tons of explosives on Gaza in the first two weeks of the assault to obliterate at least 45 percent of Gaza’s housing units, according to the U.N. ‘s humanitarian office. They have no intention of being detoured, even by Washington.
“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported.
“In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II — including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to try to defeat those countries,” the paper continued.
The goal is a “pure” Israel, cleansed of Palestinian contaminants. Gaza is to become a wasteland. The Palestinians in Gaza will be killed or forced into refugee camps over the border in Egypt.
Messianic redemption will take place once the Palestinians are expelled. Jewish extremists call for the Al-Aqsa mosque — the third holiest shrine for Muslims, built on the ruins of the Jewish Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE by the Roman army — to be demolished.
The mosque is to be replaced by a “Third” Jewish temple, a move that would set the Muslim world alight. The West Bank, which the zealots call “Judea and Samaria,” will be formally annexed by Israel. Israel, governed by the religious laws imposed by the ultra-orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism parties, will be a Jewish version of Iran.
The Rev. Dr. Mae Elise Cannon is the Executive Director of the organization, Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), an organization with which I am involved.
She is also a friend of mine. (By the way, Mae has two doctorates.)
In fact, we were both recently in Phoenix, AZ attending the same conference sponsored by the Netword of Evangelicals for the Middle East (NEME). I am a member of the NEME leadership committee.
Today, Rob and Mae discuss the political dimensions of the current war against Gaza. Mae’s work keeps her heavily involved in a great deal of lobbying and activism in Washington, D.C.
There is a lot of vital information here about what is happening right now in Israel, Palestine, and the USA. Check it out.
My good friend, Dr. Rob Dalrymple, is hosting a series of podcasts discussing the current Israeli war against Gaza.
Rob will host a number of informative guests over the next several weeks (including yours truly) discussing different dimensions of this ongoing conflict.
Today, Rob introduces the issues himself. He is a former pastor, the author of several books, has visited Israel/Palestine numerous times, and is deeply involved in Christian activism for peace in the Holy Land.
I encourage you to watch, listen, take notes, pray, respond and come back tomorrow for another installment.
Massive anti-war demonstrations have erupted around the world, sparked by Israel’s genocidal attacks against the Palestinian people, both in Gaza and the West Bank.
Several days ago, half-a-million people (!) marched through London calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
Similar marches have occurred throughout the USA, in India, Pakistan, the UK, and many other countries.
Yet, the political elites in these countries continue to control the propagandistic news media while ignoring the protests of the common people.
Craig Murray has a good story critiquing the disparate, undemocratic actions that keep the people’s voices muted, ensuring that worldwide calls for peace go ignored.
The article at Consortium News is titled “Something has Snapped.” Below is an excerpt:
There seems to be a presumption that the general population harbour the same Zionist assumptions which the journalists are paid to promote. Well, we don’t.
It feels like something has snapped, not only in Palestine but in the U.K. and much of Europe, where the process of alienation between the governed and the ruling classes has been accelerated.
Democracy has been failing in the West for a while . . .
There are key moments in societal breakdown, and this is one.
Nathan J. Robinson has an excellent piece in the online magazine Current Affairs detailing the utter disregard, indeed distain, with which President Joe Biden treats matters of human rights in international affairs.
Biden has filled his administration with neo-conservatives who push American imperialism above every other consideration. How foreign governments treat their own people, including their dissidents — most especially their dissidents — matters not one whit to this Biden administration.
He has proven his gross disinterest time and again.
Check out Robinson’s article filled with more than enough evidence to indict Biden as one of the most hard-hearted, inhumane presidents of all time.
Below is an excerpt:
. . . The pattern is consistent. Biden believes that U.S. global power matters far more than freedom and democracy (emphasis mine). As a result, he has totally ignored the pleas of human rights activists to exert even mild pressure on authoritarian regimes.
Consider the case of Egypt. Earlier this month, the U.S. “approved $235 million in military aid for Egypt that it had withheld for the past two years because of the country’s repressive policies.” The details of the policy are ugly. That money was legally only supposed to be provided to Egypt if it met basic conditions of human rights. Eleven members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a letter to Biden imploring him to withhold the aid, citing Egypt’s jailing of “journalists, peaceful civil society activists, human rights defenders and political figures.” Biden ignored the plea and waived the legal requirement that Egypt respect basic human rights in order to receive this aid. The New York Times says the administration concluded that “national security interests outweigh congressionally mandated benchmarks for Egyptian progress on human rights.” Of course, nobody ever says how our “national security” is served by giving Egypt hundreds of millions of dollars without imposing any of the human rights requirements that Congress had demanded. Egypt has certainly learned the lesson that it need not make any human rights concessions to the U.S., because the money will keep flowing regardless. . .
Craig Murray has a good story critiquing the disparate, undemocratic actions that keep the people’s voices muted, ensuring that worldwide calls for peace go ignored.