By Corinna Barnard / Consortium News
The U.S. is currently in the chokehold of a monstrous effort to fixate the nation on fears of an entirely hypothetical genocide when a real one is taking place.
Last week a House committee redolent of the McCarthyist days of the notorious House Un-American Activities Committee conducted an inquisition of three university presidents about their toleration of terms such as “intifada,” which The New York Times, in its coverage, described as “an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.”
The key phrase in that sentence is “that many Jews hear,” a concession to the hearing being a confrontation over terminology and viewpoint. In this Zionist slapdown, legislators — with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York displaying particular ferocity — made it clear which viewpoint could prevail, politically speaking, in their house.
While fending off calls to punish their students’ political outcry during the hearing, two university leaders backtracked afterwards under growing political pressure.
You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.
They caved to the distorted notion that the speech in question called for the “genocide of the Jews,” as The New York Times laid it out, in an article entirely devoid of any examples of blatantly genocidal language.
The meeting created a sinkhole for the principle of free speech, in which words used to express the cause of Palestinian resistance were twisted into an evil intention towards Jews, at the exact time when the Israel military is perpetrating genocide.
This was more than a side show about semantics. It was a lesson in who runs Congress and whose speech is free and whose isn’t.
By Saturday the Zionists had scored a victory with news that both the University of Pennsylvania’s President Elizabeth Magill and its board chairman, Scott L. Bok, were leaving those posts under what The New York Times called “intense pressure from donors, politicians and alumni.” Magill will remain at the university as a faculty member of the law school.
News of the victory left Stafanik hungry for more heads to roll. “One down. Two to go,” she wrote, insatiably, on Twitter/X.
Palestinians may be suffering ruthless violence, but for U.S. legislators that isn’t enough. They also have to als target the supporters of Palestine and try to extinguish their power to freely speak, shout and wave placards. It’s a suppression familiar to many who have worked in major U.S. news media.
Smearing Legitimate Criticism
Last week also found the U.S. Congress — at a time when legislators ought properly to have been considering action to stop Israel’s assault on Palestinians — instead passing a resolution conflating political opposition to Israel with anti-Semitism, the generalized antagonism towards Jewish people.
Given the atrocities being committed by Israel — and the justified anger that provokes — this congressional resolution boggles the mind.
First off, the political opposition currently raging against Israel is not focused on Judaism. The opposition is that of an occupied people against a brutal occupier.
For Palestinians, the religion of this present-day occupier can be no more pertinent than was the Christianity of U.S. President Andrew Jackson for the Indigenous people he forced onto The Trail of Tears in the 19th century. What matters is the actions of the occupier, not their religion.
Secondly, Judaism is an ancient religion while Zionism is a relatively recent political project with far-right Christian supporters that has proven itself to be genocidal. None of that has to do with Jews in general and it’s highly problematic to suggest it does.
Jewish historians and intellectuals — Norman Finkelstein’s name springs to mind along with that of the Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé — have been long-standing and courageous champions of Palestinian rights. Jewish organizations such as Jewish Voices for Peace and If Not Now have been actively promoting a ceasefire since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7.
Dangerous Triumph
The extent to which media attention has minimized such individuals and groups and instead given U.S. Zionists the big platform to speak on behalf of Jews in general — at a time when thousands upon thousands of Palestinians are getting slaughtered — is a triumph of the Israel lobby’s influence and propaganda.
That achievement comes with the potentially dire consequence, however, of associating Jewish people and American citizens, generally, with the Israeli government’s genocidal violence. Numerous enemies can be created by such a devious process.
And as Cara MariAnna recently warned in her article “Israel Lobby’s Disastrous Domination,”
“U.S. security and standing in the world are suddenly more precarious than they have been the whole of its history. The U.S. is being damaged — is seriously damaging itself — by its continued unwavering support of a nation that is so clearly out of control and that has been recognized by many human rights organizations as an apartheid state. Supporting Israel is no longer in the best interest of the United States, if ever it was, and is becoming an increasing liability. “
The hand of the Israel lobby can also be assumed to be at work in the crackdown on people of conscience, who are speaking up and doing what they can to alter the evil course of events. They are in the streets shouting about the liberation of Palestine “from the river to the sea;” they are throwing paint on the buildings of weapons makers, they are confronting politicians with their inaction while children are getting killed.
These are all our everyday heroes, displaying a dedication to justice and compassion. These are the citizens we should be proud to join and know. Instead they are getting vilified, arrested, intimidated and, inevitably now it seems, cast as anti-Semites.
Historical Void
Americans are often encouraged to consider the situation in Israel too complicated to understand. It can be viewed as “that situation over there,” where they “just hate one another” to be dismissed with a fed-up gesture of the hand. Zionists rush in to fill this void with Hasbara versions — drawn from Israel’s “public diplomacy” or propaganda — of history.
Even though it doesn’t take a deep knowledge of the region to grasp the great wrong being done, a few bullet points might help create a general context:
–Israel was not created on a land without people for a people without a land. There was a thriving Palestinian society and Israel was established in 1948 by destroying hundreds of villages, killing thousands of Arabs, driving 750,000 Palestinians from their country and not allowing them to return as documented by Israel’s “new historians,” particularly by Pappé in his The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine.
—Israel’s status among human rights groups today is that of an apartheid state since Palestinians occupied illegally on the West Bank and Gaza by Israel since 1967 (in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions) have no rights;
–West Bank Israeli settlers attack Palestinians and drive them out of their homes and off their land in a slow continuation of the cleansing begun in 1947-8, now sped up in Gaza;
—Israel’s military justice system holds Palestinians in detention for years, without ever charging them with a crime; many of them children;
—Gaza is widely known as an open-air prison.
Against this basic backdrop comes the daily overload of atrocities in Gaza, which provide plenty of moral clarity, for any who are willing to follow them. Just some of the painful realities exposed daily now:
—Thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, are getting slaughtered by constant bombing.
—Israeli doctors providing written support for their military to bomb hospitals in Gaza. (Doctors gave the OK to bomb hospitals, it’s worth repeating since it’s so shocking.)
—Conditions so harsh that the rampant outbreak of disease could become an even bigger killer than all the bombing.
A video has recently surfaced showing about a hundred Palestinian men — the total number of civilians among them not yet known — stripped and kneeling in front of gun-wielding captors. An Al Jazeera reporter said the images of those Palestinian men, photographed kneeling and naked, “echo the history of the region, where stripped men are taken to unknown locations.”
Experts on the region could rattle off a much longer litany of Israeli crimes. But the point is that this list has gotten longer every day since Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7. Any American can take a position at this point, without holding an advanced degree in history.
Questions About Oct 7
There is the question of what Hamas did and didn’t do on Oct. 7, when its militants broke out of Gaza and went on the offensive. Some of the worst initial reports of atrocities against civilians have been debunked.
Other allegations are held at arms’ length until further verification is provided.
There is a live information war now over Oct 7 and it’s safe to assume that as journalists and investigators slowly settle at least some more facts, public attention will move on.
While the horrified reaction to the reports of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks on civilians is understandable, Israel’s military reaction to them is not justified. Nor is it acceptable to start and end the story on Oct. 7. Before that date and on almost every single day since, Israel has been committing collective punishment on Palestinians, which is a war crime. Amid all this, an occupied people’s right to resist must be kept in clear sight.
The extent to which Israeli crimes are being reported is shrinking as the death toll among journalists rises. More than 60 journalists and media workers in Gaza have been killed so far.
Over the Thanksgiving break three college students of Palestinian descent — two of them reportedly wearing the keffiyeh, the black-and-white scarf that can symbolize Palestinian solidarity — were shot while in the state of Vermont. Last week the last of them was released from hospital, paralyzed from the waist down, and heading to rehab.
“The shooting came as threats against Jewish, Muslim and Arab communities have increased across the U.S. in the weeks since the Israel-Hamas war erupted in early October,” local press reported.
Surely this increase in threats is a problem to solve — most effectively and obviously by working to stop Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people, which arouses understandable passions along with plenty of misunderstandings.
No one in their right mind should feel safe while this atrocity is grinding on, day after day, without any end in sight. The unhinged, vengeful violence, based on openly genocidal intentions, should freeze all our blood. So should the behavior of U.S. lawmakers last week.
Sunday, Dec. 10, by macabre timing, is United Nations’ Human Rights Day. What better time to reflect on the extent to which the U.S. and Israel violate the enormous humanitarian effort made after World War II to steer the world away from the horrors of further war. In a recent ranking of nations’ compliance with the U.N. Charter, Israel and the U.S. come last.
For human rights to be restored in Palestine, the people of Israel and Palestine need to be given the chance to live in one civil society together, sustained by international law and some means of protection to rebuild. But before anything so ambitious and hopeful can be attempted, the urgency now is to stop the bloodshed, insist on a ceasefire and attend to the wounds and suffering.
American popular pressure is required to achieve an end to the killing and to overcome the mind games of war-crime apologists. Don’t be “Good Germans,” who are condemned by history for secretly disagreeing with the Nazis, but averting their gaze and doing nothing to stop their atrocities.
