Biden is wrong to support Netanyahu's evil
It took the death of a poet to motivate me to write about
circumstances I have selfishly avoided, due to the sheer pain of
confrontation. It is a taint on my soul
that I required such impetus, so belated in my response; for the horror of the
butchery of war, a tyrant’s unjustified, merciless infliction, has been global
center stage; first Putin in Ukraine, and more recently Netanyahu in Israel. Both have initiated a bloody campaign of wanton bombing and rampant war crimes. The Washington Post led off today with “More
than 20,000 dead in Gaza, a historic human toll.” Hospitals, homes, and, in general, the structural
cores of communities have been pulverized into rubble.
The secondary headline read, “How Israel pushed over a million
Palestinians into a tiny corner of Gaza.”
A more honest headline would have used the word “herded”;
for the people are being treated as subhuman, as nothing more than animals.
Netanyahu knows what happens when you drop so many bombs of such power, on par with the USA’s ordinance in Vietnam, and then send tanks
to rumble through the annihilated areas (1).
With every such attack, it is clear that children will suffer and die in
the bombardment. Netanyahu is following
his fellow dictator Putin’s strategy:
the use of atrocity and barbarism to shock and cow opposition. The victims, those who survive, suffer and
witness incomprehensible cruelties.
Witnessing the slightest bit of it myself, through news
media, I found myself asking, ‘Who can defeat the Devil’s sword?’
Such are the times in which we parlously dwell. A wave of fascism menaces the world, and on its crest ride dictators who not only lack conscience but unfetter pure evil. Why? To spread their own narcissistic reach. To aggrandize themselves.
Netanyahu
referenced the Old Testament, 1 Samuel 15:3, to justify his actions:
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
In cultish
calculation, charismatic dictators such as Putin and Netanyahu are manipulative
and perceptive. In management of government
or business they are corrupt, above all else, and beyond that glaringly
incompetent. And when it comes to
matters of decency and ethics, they present a barren, twofold face: the cold eyes of an insect, and the bellowing
rage of a beast, one that lacks loyalty to anything except the bottomless
rapacity of its insecure ego.
Often such leaders are called “strongmen.” I completely object to this misnomer. It grants them an unworthy association with
the virtue of strength. As I have
written in other posts, leaders like Netanyahu should be called what they
are: parasites. They are parasites that gorge to bloat on vitality and virtue, leaving an improverish, enfeebled nation
Indeed, Israel is fast becoming hated and isolated on the
world stage. Netanyahu himself has been
charged with felony corruption in Israel. Yet he still manages to get these charges put on hold, over and
over, due to political crises that he does his best to foment. It has come out, in fact, that he was paying
Hamas through Qatar, money that Hamas used to buy weapons, no doubt involved in its Octorber 7 attack.
My point is, these ‘strongmen’ are parasites. They bring crises and corruption. They have, for instance, no qualms about starting a war for no reason except political gain.
In the sights of my pen--a far better way to target than the sights of a gun--is Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing. The genocide of the citizens of Gaza. There is no doubt this is what’s happening. The horror is as naked as a stomping footprint of Godzilla. An area the size of Rhode Island has been reduced to ruins in a little over two months. The people--refugees in their own land--have been herded into a tiny corner where they starve; where they lack electricity and water, and face disease. Without embellishment, the statistics chill and render agonized anyone who dares empathy: 20,000 dead, seventy percent women and children. Beyond the statistics, fearless journalists have recorded the travail, some of them dying for their bravery. We see rivers of refugees, on foot and haggard, scenes reminiscent of WWII. We hear how mothers and their children, trapped under collapsed structures, perish before help can reach them. We see bullet-riddled hospitals, half destroyed by bombs, in which the IDF claims Hamas had been hiding; and yet the evidence is not sufficient to show any such thing (WaPo). We learn that the so-called “safe zones" have been relabeled as “safer zones” by the IDF. An Orwellian change that sugercoats the truth: the refugee camps that the Palestinians were told seek have themselves been bombed.
Overall, there are many films and images of
children maimed, bloodied, sobbing ... Most recently I saw corpses of newborns in a hospital who died because Israel cut the power.
CNN informs us that half the bombs dropped by
Israel have been “unguided” bombs, and therefore indiscriminate:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/13/politics/intelligence-assessment-dumb-bombs-israel-gaza/index.html
The hunger, the bombing, the internet blackouts, the
disease, the treatment of humans as chattel--actually worse than chattel, for even
chattel are given food and water--this all redounds on Netanyahu. Two days ago, we learned that IDF soldiers
killed three shirtless men waving a white flag.
It turned out that they were Israeli citizens who were hostages of
Hamas. The IDF soldiers seem possessed by a spirit of vengeance and bloodlust. Their
first reaction is to injudiciously kill, even if the victims have no weapons,
are shirtless, and wave a white flag. One
of the men yelled out in Hebrew, and was shot anyway.
Does the IDF hate the Palestinians so much that their
first reaction is to swiftly pull the trigger?
With the barest details, given above, it is evident that what
is going on in Gaza is the unspeakable act of a dictator, Netanyahu, carrying
out a plan of extirpation--to pull out by the roots. It is so wicked and racist that it must be called a pogrom; and so Netanyahu is doing to others what was done to the Jewish people by
Hitler. It is a perverse version of the Hammurabic
Code, a genocide for a genocide, the exact opposite of the Golden Rule.
At least one prominent thinker, Macha Gessen, has made a comparison between the Jewish Ghetto and the living conditions of Palestinians:
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/in-the-shadow-of-the-holocaust
For this, the writer received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought:
https://apnews.com/article/germany-hannah-arendt-prize-masha-gessen-1923648579baea413c8b35cc436375fe
To conclude this paper, I am compelled to ask, What the hell
is the President of the United States, Joe Biden, doing?
The world watches what is happening in Gaza as if a scene
from Dante’s Inferno had risen from the mythological depths. We witness it on handheld devices, thanks to our
telecommunicated era. We see the
Palestinians, the majority of whom are not Hamas, wither and die under
starvation, privation, slaughter, and forced containment in death fields that once
constituted home and community. And we see
President Biden supplying the bombs. We see Biden leveraging the USA’s veto power in
the United Nation to argue against a ceasefire.
We watch this, not just me, many people--people who embrace the dire importance
of “Never Again”--and we say, “You! Aren’t
you the leader of the ‘free- world’? You! Aren’t you the so-called champion of human
rights?”
Repeatedly on this blog, I have argued that ethics is a technology
that we humans can advance; and that a democracy should and must advance human
rights, not just wave them in gilded font on its banner. Failure to advance ethics technology will
most likely result in a Doomsday War that will end civilization (2).
Because this is such a horrific thing to say, something
that I myself find almost unimaginable, I will elaborate my arguments in
respect to Netanyahu’s evil.
Fascist dictators rise to power by instilling hate in their worshipful followers, hate for specific target groups--the effigies, the scapegoats. This hate is of the most virulent sort. It is a hate so furious, so limitless, that it does not shy from the death of children, It does not shy from the enaction of 1 Samuel 15:3. Indeed, this hate has to be that extreme to create cultish followers; a hate so vast that it obliterates reason and blinds conscience; a hate that implants a psychotic delusion: that certain human beings aren’t human at all, only “vermin.”
This is the kind of hate that a fascist dictator must
sow to seize absolute control and
demand anything that he wants (I use the pronoun 'he' because sexism and anti-LGBTQ+ are inherent to
fascism). The
followers sacrifice health and money, as their leader vacuums up riches. If told to die for the dictator, they will. If told to murder, there is no remorse. Their reality is what the dictator wants it
to be. It is hard to fathom that people
could be so ignorant and self-destructive.
It comes down this virulent hate, which draws from the worst of fear. A hate so strong it walls off the mind from reason
and rectitude. Brick by brick the
dictator builds this wall. His tongue is
the trowel. His deceit is the mortar. Hate is the brick itself.
Again, I ask, what is Joe Biden doing? His choice to support Netanyahu is unfathomable
in its failure. Not only a failure to
advance human rights but, as well, an antithetical act that disgusts the conscience--the condoning of genocide. Even as Biden warns the world
about a fascist dictator in America, Donald Trump, he turns around and supports another one. He undercuts his own integrity and
message. He says to Netanyahu, “Go
on. Drop your 2,000lbs bombs. I will even give them to you. Drop them indiscriminately. I know they will kill thousands of children,
but, please, go ahead. Rumble your tanks
through the ruins created by your ethnic cleansing.”
I didn’t want to write this. Evil is hard to face. But we ought to, regardless. I understand people are selfish, so I ask you this: Do you want to survive? Do you want your children to survive? Fascist dictators seek war. Putin did. Netanyahu did. Such evil could easily spark WWIII. Remember how WWI started: an assassin's bullet. That was all it took.
Nationalism and hate are on the rise, taking the world to the brink of doom. There is Xi in China, Modi in India, Kim Jong Un in North Korea, and many more. If Trump wins in 2024, the USA will become fascist.
And so, it is quite simple. Do you want to survive? Do you want your children to survive? If so, stand up to fascism. Civilization will not survive malignant narcissistic tyrants who use their armies to expand their egos. Nuclear weapons will be launched.
The poet I mentioned in the first sentence of this essay is Refaat Alareer. The last poem he wrote before he died was, “If I Die.” He was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed several members of his family:
https://lithub.com/watch-brian-cox-read-if-i-must-die-by-murdered-palestinian-poet-refaat-alareer/
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Footnote
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1/23/24 ...typo edits
12/26/23 ... more streamlined, better writing ...
12/25/23 ... smoothed the writing a little
12/24/23 ...
[Although this essay needs editing, I wanted to get it posted before Christmas. I'll edit it more soon. On Christmas, I want to celebrate the joyous side of life. I feel, however, that we need to face the dark side of life just as fully. "That which we do not bring into consciousness appears in our lives as fate."]
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