U.S. Forces Are Now Murdering Palestinians in Gaza, While Israel Maintains Abu Ghraib-Style Torture Camps
Over 250 Palestinians were murdered by Israeli forces in a U.S.-backed raid that freed just 4 Israeli hostages. In Israel, Palestinian detainees are having electric prods forced into their anuses.
That’s what’s happening right now. The headline and the subheading says it all. But of course there is more to say. You can read or listen to the reporting of those facts about the multiple Israeli torture camps — where Palestinians are being beaten, amputated, raped, starved, and murdered — and the recent Nuseirat massacre — where U.S. and Israeli forces bombed the whole area and snuck in using humanitarian aid trucks that came from the U.S.-made pier in Gaza — both here and here. It’s no longer just American tax dollars that are funding the genocide. Real American hands are now bringing about deaths in Gaza.
I don’t need to get into all of the details of those stories when they are perfectly available elsewhere. Mostly I just want to tell you that this whole U.S.-led project of empire and global capitalism, long given legitimacy by a veneer of liberal platitudes, is not worth preserving. It deserved to die a long time ago. They are right to hate us. All of them. Everywhere. We have no right to ask for forgiveness. We have no right to feel sorry. We have no right to enjoy the poisoned bloody fruits of empire. Every death by our country’s hands is an irrevocable failure of our collective movements for justice. I want to tell you that these people you call terrorists are your very children. You birthed them. You raised them. And now you must deal with them.
I want to tell you that Aaron Bushnell was right, and so was Alice Herz, both in what they did and what they said. Bushnell wrote shortly before he self-immolated at the Israeli Embassy in Washington D.C. in protest of Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinians, “Many of us like to ask ourselves, ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now.”
In her 1965 letter written shortly before she set herself on fire on a Detroit street corner in protest of Lyndon Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, Alice Herz, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, called her adoptive countrymen to action:
Confused by hatred and fear that were consciously stirred up over the last twenty years, you allowed your lawmakers in Congress to spend endless billions of dollars on an incalculable arsenal of destruction.
Awake and act, before it's too late! Yours is the responsibility to decide, if this world shall be made available to live for all human beings, to be the site of a good, dignified and peaceful life - or whether she should blow herself up into oblivion.
Bushnell’s and Herz’s sacrifice, their divine violence, their sublime madness, their flash of conviction, is precisely what our tired, decadent, somnambulant society needs. As I see what we wreak upon the Palestinians every day, contrasted with the contagion of moral apathy in our society, our unthinking retreat into the frivolous and the trivial, our happy opiates, our deathly American trance — I want to scream. I want to overthrow the tables. I want to wake the children sleeping. No more can this go on.
On September 11th, 2001, Al-Qaeda opened a calamitous Pandora’s Box. They poked the eye of the dragon. In time, in some twisted way, that terror attack may be seen as the central event which precipitated the fall of the dastardly American empire. We wasted what worldwide sympathy we had after 9/11 by using it as a pretext to carry out disastrous, crusading wars that accomplished nothing except the murder of millions and the loss of any remaining belief in the U.S.-led “international rules-based order.” We kidnapped people and sent them to torture camps. We rained death on entire lands, wiping out whole families using trigger men sitting comfortably on the other side of the world staring at figures on computer screens. We killed hundreds of thousands in Afghanistan in order to maintain an enrichment scheme for U.S. private contractors. In the short term, 9/11 was a gift to the “self-licking ice cream cone” that is the military industrial complex. In the long term, because of our hubris, our inchoate violence, our total abandoning of humanity, that attack, ironically, may mean our complete undoing.
The U.S. unleashed globalized lawlessness unto the world after our bruising that day. Every single criminal act that we normalized in our reactionary war on terror has now been adopted by other nations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended his genocidal acts by saying that the U.S. would be "doing a hell of a lot more" after a terror attack like October 7th.
If we can do it, why can’t they? Thus, Israel tortures Palestinian prisoners, none of whom have legal representation nor have been charged with a crime. The shocking levity on display in the pictures that U.S. soldiers took of themselves at Abu Ghraib — forcing Iraqi prisoners to pile naked on top of each other, forcing them to jerk each other off, siccing dogs on them, spreading feces all over them, smiling and flashing a thumbs up in front of their corpses, forcing them to walk on all fours while leashed like dogs — this casual cruelty and unafraid posterity is now what characterizes the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. We do these horrific things because we know that we will never be held accountable. Our victims are losers. We are the gangster state that would be nothing without its guns. Because of these and other things, our whole world deserves to be turned topsy-turvy. To be torn asunder. So the last shall be first, and the first shall be last. Amen.
