"Slow Death in Gaza"

7.6.08

Margaret Kimberley has written an excellent article entitled "Slow death in Gaza" in The Electronic Intifada (6 June 2008). She condemns the US's role in supporting Israel's apartheid suppression of Palestineans in Gaza, but she also points fingers at the rest of the world who remain silent and distant from the horror.

Kimberley begins her article by saying:

"Each American claim to moral authority becomes a foul excretion in light of US complicity in Israel's barbaric and illegal treatment of the Palestinians. Washington deploys its superpower apparatus to smother dissent against its Middle East policy in Europe and elsewhere, leaving former president Jimmy Carter and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu as lonely defenders of Palestinian human rights. No change in American policy is on the horizon, as "the rot in America goes beyond this administration, and so does the rot in Israel." The "abomination," as Desmond Tutu describes it, against 1.6 million people in Palestine shows the hypocrisy of American and Israeli pretenses to civilization."

Tutu states further, as pointed out by Kimberley, that: "This is not something you want to wish on your worst enemy."

Tutu is right.

There is hardly a leadership voice in the West that has the courage to step up and confront Israel. To do so would risk falling on the wrong side of the US and being labelled an anti-semite and/or supporter of Islamic terrorism.

It is past the time that thinking activists everywhere should have been compelled to stand-up and contest Israel's apartheid oppression of Palestineans.

There can be no moral ground for silence and complicity at any level, including that of the individual.

One of the strengths of liberal democracy is its belief in the power of the individual to speak truth to power.

A big part of the truth of liberal democracy is its interest in universal human rights.

How, then, can any Obama or McCain supporter ignore their candidate's complicity in the US's obsessive habit of ignoring the human rights of Palestineans?

This question should ring particularly loud for the Obama crowd.

Obama supporters, however, seem more comfortable ignoring or downplaying the serious implications of his recent speech to AIPAC?

The problem is that the fate of Palestineans is like a distant flickering light in the political sight of Obama supporters.

Some want to care but can't, and won't, really relate beyond their own immediate interests.

In all, those who support leaders who are complicit in the oppression of Palestineans are no better than their leaders, and must therefore, accept the brutal consequences as an intrinsic part of their lives and their doing.

There are no innocent oppressors anywhere.

Ridwan Laher

Credit: Margaret Kimberely's article first appeared in Black Agenda Report.