Slaughter is not self-defense: The assault on Gaza and the corruption of language
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/slaughter-corruption-language.html
We are witnessing the unspeakable, again. Are there any words left adequate to the abomination of Israel’s ongoing onslaught on Gaza, an assault that is proceeding with dismal predictability, and that is, in fact, a repetition and an escalation rather than a recommencement of violence? It is 2009 all over again; it is 2012 all over again. 1400 Palestinians were killed in Operation Cast Lead, fitting prelude to Barack Obama’s inauguration; 161 were killed in 2012, a minor tribute to his re-election. Already, more than a thousand Palestinians have died in what is the most savage yet of these assaults, and President Obama continues to call it self-defense, though he dutifully regrets the loss of innocent civilian lives.
Let us not descend to this game of differentiating Palestinian civilians, or even Palestinian children, from Palestinian “combatants.” Israel targets Palestinians because Palestinians’ very existence is resistance, not because Hamas uses them as human shields. It is this diverse, differentiated, creative, vital, persistent existence of Palestinians that frustrates Israel, not the existence of Hamas or its rockets, which Israel has never really sought to eradicate, so handy an excuse are they for its periodic incursions and slaughters. And since it is the Palestinians’ right, as it is that of any occupied people, to resist, Israel’s resort is to deny them the right to exist.
So, for all the sanctimonious prattle emanating from Washington, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Fox News about protecting civilian lives, Israel’s aim once again seems to be to murder so many Palestinians that their individual identities dissolve into an undifferentiated statistical mass and they will become nameless. It is not enough that they be killed. Their very existence must be annulled, in keeping with the old Zionist lie about a land without people.
But for Israel to do so, Palestinians must be morally evicted beyond the line that separates human beings from things to be destroyed. So Israel’s mouthpieces and their global flock of media parrots chatter earnestly about how Arab culture does not value human life as Israelis do. Or, like US General James Conway, they bleat after Benjamin Netanyahu about the “deep and wide moral abyss” that separates Israel from its enemies; like Harvard Professor Ruth Wisse, they replay ad nauseam Golda Meir’s hypocritical jest about how peace would come “when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us”; or, like even Israeli columnist and liberal Zionist Ari Shavit, they wonder why Palestine has yet to produce a Nelson Mandela, conveniently forgetting that for decades Mandela too was jailed as a terrorist.
= new reply since forum marked as read
What a load of manure.
- And so are we. 
