It is heartening to see people from this town give up a portion of their time on a Saturday to come out in solidarity with those subject to Nazi-like genocide. There are other things people would rather be doing on a Saturday, especially one as sunnily beautiful as today, but have no intention of doing while people of the same race as themselves - the human race - are being mercilessly slaughtered by Israeli Einsatzgruppen in what has come to take on the features of a war of extermination.
When the Israeli SS officer Tomer Grinberg was taken out by Palestinian fighters in December 2023 as he sat planning the murder of Palestinian children, there was much made in the pro-Zionist media of his love for his three year old daughter. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, lived with his wife and five children in the camp where daily he gassed thousands of Jews. Like, Grinberg, after his murderous work, he would walk the few yards to his children and resume family life. Loving one's own children is not enough to comply with the human moral code. The refusal to kill the children of others is just as important.
In less than an hour's time we shall gather again in West Street in solidarity with the children of Gaza and their families being bombed and starved to death. Most if not all of us will have consumed a full breakfast before we leave our homes. There will be no hunger pangs assailing us as we stand. In Gaza, both homes and breakfasts are in short supply. Even Donald Trump complains that people are starving in Gaza. For once he is not lying. Anybody familiar with World War 2 will most likely understand the Wehrmacht siege of Leningrad. Unlike Stalingrad, where the Nazis sought to swiftly murder their way to victory, in Leningrad the war of extermination was to be won through slow starvation.
During the week I had an exchange with a Christian pastor. He professed his pride in being a member of the British empire. I can understand a person having a sense of pride at being a member of British society. But pride at belonging to a blood soaked empire that brought murder, slavery, genocide, torture, starvation to millions across the globe occupies a lowly moral plain to which the pastor has descended. He has achieved something very few others have in his lifetime: started at the bottom and worked his way down. It is no surprise that he also supports Israel in its war of extermination. Tomorrow Pastor Pompous will don his funny clothes and in true Pharisean style mumble pious platitudes from his bible while sermonising to his flock about all manner of things except one thing: Israeli atrocity in Gaza. He didn't preach against it last week. He will not preach against it next week. His well-filled stomach will help him forget the empty stomachs of children dying from starvation in Gaza. But at least he will help aid our understanding of how Christian pastors - pastords is perhaps a more appropriate term for the type - could come to serve in the Einsatzgruppen while it lined up Jewish men, women and children at the side of the ravine that would become their mass grave at Babi Yar. Against such a backdrop, the phrase there is no hate like Christian love is easier understood.
Sometimes as we stand in West Street a racist will approach and hurl abuse, demanding in perfect English that we abandon all that is foreign and concentrate on the Irish. When responded to in the Irish tongue a vacant blank gaze draws across their faces. The Irish language too it seems is foreign to them.
In spite of it all, abandonment is not on our agenda as the young and the not so young continue to assemble here in the full knowledge that while we are standing Gaza is starving. 300 Gazans reported dead since Thursday. For that reason alone we can never fail to turn up.
Hitler's greatest achievement, arguably, was to have moulded a Jewish state in his own image. How absurd and repellant is that? The Jewish Kapos in Hitler's concentration camps were the vilest of people, every bit as pernicious as their SS guards. They brutalised and murdered their fellow Jewish inmates to curry favour with the Nazi authorities. Their type, with their penchant for savagery and brutality, now govern the state of Israel and are merely carrying on in the tradition of the camp Kapos.
These people are no better than Nazis and we should never refrain from saying it, particularly so when we can so readily intuitively sense that there are few moral qualms in Israel about solving the Palestinian question through the gas chamber.
These people are no better than Nazis and we should never refrain from saying it, particularly so when we can so readily intuitively sense that there are few moral qualms in Israel about solving the Palestinian question through the gas chamber.
When the Israeli SS officer Tomer Grinberg was taken out by Palestinian fighters in December 2023 as he sat planning the murder of Palestinian children, there was much made in the pro-Zionist media of his love for his three year old daughter. Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, lived with his wife and five children in the camp where daily he gassed thousands of Jews. Like, Grinberg, after his murderous work, he would walk the few yards to his children and resume family life. Loving one's own children is not enough to comply with the human moral code. The refusal to kill the children of others is just as important.
In less than an hour's time we shall gather again in West Street in solidarity with the children of Gaza and their families being bombed and starved to death. Most if not all of us will have consumed a full breakfast before we leave our homes. There will be no hunger pangs assailing us as we stand. In Gaza, both homes and breakfasts are in short supply. Even Donald Trump complains that people are starving in Gaza. For once he is not lying. Anybody familiar with World War 2 will most likely understand the Wehrmacht siege of Leningrad. Unlike Stalingrad, where the Nazis sought to swiftly murder their way to victory, in Leningrad the war of extermination was to be won through slow starvation.
During the week I had an exchange with a Christian pastor. He professed his pride in being a member of the British empire. I can understand a person having a sense of pride at being a member of British society. But pride at belonging to a blood soaked empire that brought murder, slavery, genocide, torture, starvation to millions across the globe occupies a lowly moral plain to which the pastor has descended. He has achieved something very few others have in his lifetime: started at the bottom and worked his way down. It is no surprise that he also supports Israel in its war of extermination. Tomorrow Pastor Pompous will don his funny clothes and in true Pharisean style mumble pious platitudes from his bible while sermonising to his flock about all manner of things except one thing: Israeli atrocity in Gaza. He didn't preach against it last week. He will not preach against it next week. His well-filled stomach will help him forget the empty stomachs of children dying from starvation in Gaza. But at least he will help aid our understanding of how Christian pastors - pastords is perhaps a more appropriate term for the type - could come to serve in the Einsatzgruppen while it lined up Jewish men, women and children at the side of the ravine that would become their mass grave at Babi Yar. Against such a backdrop, the phrase there is no hate like Christian love is easier understood.
Sometimes as we stand in West Street a racist will approach and hurl abuse, demanding in perfect English that we abandon all that is foreign and concentrate on the Irish. When responded to in the Irish tongue a vacant blank gaze draws across their faces. The Irish language too it seems is foreign to them.
In spite of it all, abandonment is not on our agenda as the young and the not so young continue to assemble here in the full knowledge that while we are standing Gaza is starving. 300 Gazans reported dead since Thursday. For that reason alone we can never fail to turn up.
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The tortured become the torturers certainly rings true. People must be careful to distinguish between the Jew and the Israeli state, although inextricably linked on a human level they are certainly apart.
ReplyDeleteIt is extremely disturbing to see the lack of empathy that is prevelanet amonsgt my fellow citizens and neighbours towards the plight of the Palestinian people. But the sad reality is, at this moment in time all the protests in the world wont make a difference. Something has to happen elsewhere.
I think there is a keen awareness of the distinction. The Israeli state tries to blur the difference for the purposes of labelling as antisemitic anyone who criticises its genocidal policies.
DeleteAs for protests, does much ever change without pressure from below? The challenge is in trying to get the protest finger to press down on the policy button. But I think you are attuned to the difficulties in moving that needle.