Images Of Auschwitz From Gaza

Anthony McIntyre ☠ In less than an hour's time I will leave the warmth of the home for the bitter chill of West Street to stand with others in ongoing opposition to genocide in Gaza.

It is a weekly event at which Stephanie Kirwan and others remind us from a human rights perspective of our obligations to the besieged people of Gaza now in the fifth month's of Israel's Blitzkrieg. Every so often a religious lunatic comes past and shouts something about God being king and that we should not be desecrating his hallowed ground by standing in solidarity with his supposed creatures. During the week as I passed the church somebody moved to hand me a leaflet. I shook my head and told him I didn't want it. He too started shouting that God is king. The middle finger to all of that no hate like Christian love. Fortunately, others with hearts not driven by hate theology are much more empathetic to the besieged Gazans.

Earlier this week the Israeli-American double act morphed into an incongruous double standard. If Joe Biden thought he was being a stand up comedian, even he in his demented state should either have known or been advised that the site of genocide is not the place to perform comedy. Dropping aid from the skies to starving Gazans while at the same time providing bombs for Nazi Israel to drop from the same skies, is an absurdity that devalues Western values even more than the depreciation such values have undergone already during the war. Beside killing five of the people the aid bombs were meant to save - and their deaths cannot be regarded by any stetch of the imagination as the result of friendly fire but rather of face-saving hypocrisy - it was nothing other than a PR stunt designed to give a facelift to the image of US foreign policy, damaged so badly over its arms for genocide policy.

Israel's starvation policy which was endorsed last October by the the leader of the British Labour Party, Sir Keir Starver, has now reached the point where the images coming out of Gaza immediately remind us of what existed in the Nazi death camps.

The savagery and brutality of the Kapo state, with its penchant for child murder, has left many thinking that it constitutes the most vile regime of our day. That may or may not be true but that it stands accused of genocide in the International Court of Justice puts it in the uniquely evil typology.

So as I prepare to leave the house to stand with others like Stephanie Kirwan, Brian Condra - who has a voice that booms like Brian Blessed's and requires no loudhailer - Rosie Condra, Bobby McCormack, and all those others who turn up each Saturday in solidarity, the Auschwitz-like image of a dead child in Gaza prompts me to recite the words of Alon Mizrahi:

There is one child in Gaza your resolve can save. Just one. Think of him, or her. This will give you strength. This is what I do. There is one child my not despairing can save, and I am never letting that child down.

We stand on the steps to save a child.

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