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 The World as It IsPosted on Mar 10, 2008
By Chris Hedges War creates a world without empathy. Those who have empathy cannot, as did Palestinian gunman Alaa Hisham Abu Dheim, coldly murder students in a Jerusalem library. Those who have empathy cannot drop tons of iron fragmentation bombs on crowded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, killing more than 120 Palestinians in a week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians. Those who have empathy do not, as Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai did, thunder at the Palestinians that they face a shoah, meaning catastrophe or holocaust. Those with empathy are unable to rejoice, as many leaders of Hamas did, over slaughter, as if the murder of the other’s innocents is justified by the murder of your innocents.
We live in a world, at home and in the Middle East, hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do no love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses. And we are all guilty, Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis and Israelis. But we are not all guilty equally.
I and the public know
The long, slow drip of collective humiliation and abuse, along with the tiny and large indignities that go into transforming human beings into fanatics, is rarely understood by those on the outside. It ticks away like a clock until it suddenly explodes in our face. Because we do not know where it came from, it strikes us as incomprehensible, irrational, the product of a demented form of humanity. These killers, however, are not formed by the Quran or Islam or a culture that is morally inferior to our own. They are formed by a 40-year occupation, by the continued expansion of Jewish settlements, by the refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees, by the use of fighter jets to bomb squalid refugee camps and by an Israeli siege of Gaza that has blocked fuel, electricity and essential supplies and created a humanitarian crisis for 1.5 million Palestinians. It is what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians, what we have done to the Iraqis, that has brought us to this impasse. We unleashed this violence and only we can end it. Hamas was a nonentity, a tiny group of radicals who wielded no influence and had little following when in 1988 I first reported from Gaza. But the steady drumbeat of Israeli repression and violence, aided by the corruption and incompetence of Yasser Arafat, led to Hamas’ slow rise to supplant Arafat’s Fatah party. By 2006 Hamas was elected to power. This election, by all accounts free and fair, saw Jerusalem and Washington begin a covert effort to overthrow Hamas, according to documents obtained by Vanity Fair and the Guardian. The Fatah leader Muhammad Dahlan was, according to these documents, given cash, weapons and assistance through Egypt and Jordan to start a Palestinian civil war. Hamas stepped in to thwart the attempted coup. It drove Dahlan and Fatah out of Gaza. The current bifurcation of Palestinian territories, with Hamas in control of Gaza and Fatah in control of the West Bank, began. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, unable to break Hamas with the siege and frustrated by the Palestinians’ spontaneous rupture of the barricades that separate the Gaza Strip from Egypt, is trying to pound Gaza into submission. During the past three months of unrelenting Israeli strikes, over 300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have died in Israeli attacks. The strikes have done nothing, however, to halt the rocket attacks on Israeli towns or end Hamas rule. Amnesty International, CARE International and Oxfam UK, along with other humanitarian aid groups, in a report last week said that living conditions in Gaza are at their worst point since Israel occupied the strip in 1967. The report estimated that 80 percent of the residents of Gaza are now dependent on food aid, compared with 63 percent two years ago. It noted that unemployment is about 40 percent among the general population and 70 percent in the private sector. The aid groups document power cuts to hospitals of as long as 12 hours a day, 50 million liters of sewage pouring into the sea daily, and water and sewage systems on the brink of collapse. The groups have called on the European Union and the British government to pressure Israel to open border crossings and begin negotiations with Hamas. Washington and Jerusalem have little interest in a peaceful settlement. They are blinded by their own military prowess. They do not grasp that a continuation of violence and a tightening of the siege will spur more desperate and embittered young men and women to acts of vengeance. The only route left is to hear the cries of all the victims, Israeli and Palestinian, to recapture empathy. Hamas’ offer to negotiate a truce, an offer backed by 64 percent of Israelis, is the only escape route. There is no option other than to finally give the Palestinians control over their lives and land. It is the only option that will, as well, save us in Iraq. The occupation of Palestinian territory, like the occupation of Iraq, is illegal, increasingly violent and counterproductive. I was in Gaza in 1993 after the Oslo peace accord was signed. It was as if, after years of suffocation, Palestinians and Israelis could breathe. But Oslo, in the hands of former Israeli Prime Ministers Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, was strangled and thwarted. Peace eludes us in Palestine, Israel and Iraq not because people do not want peace but because we are governed by moral and intellectual trolls. The Palestine Liberation Organization, headed by the Fatah party, was once considered a terrorist organization. It was illegal for an Israeli to have contact with the PLO. Those Israelis who called for negotiations with the Palestinian group were attacked and vilified. The Israeli government, however, under the pragmatism of Yitzhak Rabin, violated its own ban and began secret negotiations with the PLO. These negotiations led to the Oslo peace agreement. Fatah, today, is touted by Jerusalem and Washington as an ally in the war against Hamas and a partner for peace. The dynamics of power have changed. They will change again. Hamas is a reality that, however distasteful, is not going to go away. Any peace deal reached without Hamas is doomed to fail. The only question left is how many more people are going to die needlessly in Israel, in Palestine and in Iraq before Israeli and American leaders begin to deal with the world as it is, not as they wish it to be. Previous item: The President You Are Trying to Reach Is Unavailable Next item: Putting Clinton and Obama on the Grill Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig.
By Daniel, March 19 at 6:30 am # Too many humans on this increasingly small planet!
By guntotinganglion, March 15 at 10:47 am # Consider if a bunker buster does go bust, and blows apart in a conventional explosion (this would be the dirty bomb scenario that Bushemada fabricated against Jose Padilla (a US CITIZEN), whom he then tortured into insanity while attempting to get him to admit to). The penetrator would disintegrate as it hit, say a thick basalt layer, at perhaps ten meters depth, and the splash ejecta from the explosion (carrying the vaporized radioactive core) could easily scatter highly radioactive powder over a wide area. That area would then be a no-mans land (virtually) forever. Come to think of it, that’s probably the plan. No more centrifuge activity there, whether there was any to begin with or not. Poison the land permanently, story over. Remember the old joke about oxymorons and military intelligence? Well, the people who design and fabricate these grotesque weapons may be smart, but the people who use them are often even more dense than the rock layers they intend to penetrate. They believe that America can do no wrong technologically. Tell it to the crew of Challenger, or Columbia. Tell it to New Orleans. Tell it to the victims of 9/11 who should have been protected by a country that firehoses money on national security, but totally misses this threat that was screaming in their faces (that would be you Condoleeza Rice, Ms National Security Advisor!) for months in advance of the attack (a time when oddly, John Ashcroft stopped using public air transport, which as Attorney General, he is required to do). When America fails, it fails in spectacular ways...and this insane gambit is a guaranteed failure in the making. The sheer number of required targets that ALL have to be taken out with “surgical” precision (like doing surgery with a chain saw) in a very short time, boggles the mind. And truth be told, they don’t know where a lot of what they want to target actually is! But that never stops Lord High Inquisitor Bushemada! He is the master of ignorant arrogance, and I am certain he intends to prove that again very shortly. And he will fail, as he did in Afghanistan, and as he did, and continues to do, in Iraq.
By guntotinganglion, March 14 at 9:46 pm # Consider if a bunker buster goes bust, and blows apart in a conventional explosion. This would be the dirty bomb scenario that Bushemada claimed Jose Padilla was planning, that he tortured him into insanity for. Have the penetrator break up in a thick basalt layer, and have this happen ten meters down, and the splash of ejecta from the explosive impact would atomize the warhead core and scatter the powder over a wide area. That area would then be no-mans land (virtually) forever. Come to think of it, that’s probably the plan. That’s also how depleted uranium rounds work...but that’s another story. Remember the old joke about oxymorons and military intelligence? Well, the people who design and fabricate these grotesque weapons may be smart, but the people who use them are often as dense as the rock layers they intend to penetrate. They believe that America can do no wrong technologically. Tell it to the crew of Challenger, or Columbia. When America fails, it fails in spectacular ways...and this insane gambit is a guaranteed failure in the making. The sheer number of required targets that ALL have to be taken out with “surgical” precision (like doing surgery with a chain saw) in a very short time, boggles the mind. And truth be told, they don’t know where a lot of what they want to target actually is! But that never stops Lord High Inquisitor Bushemada! He is the master of ignorant arrogance, and I am certain he intends to prove that again very shortly. And he will fail, as he did in Afghanistan, and as he did, and continues to do, in Iraq. However, most Americans can’t grasp the concept that they aren’t the omnipotent master race that can never fail if it just throws enough resources at the problem (hey...we landed on the moon!). Regardless of the US press, we are normal human beings who screw up a LOT...Bushemada’s Presidency being a prime example of that concept. This may be our last failure though, before the shit hits the fan...and when it does, it’ll be duck and cover time all over again, one way, or another.
By Sandy Q, March 14 at 9:59 am # killing civiliansThe article sys half of those killed in Gaza by fragmentation bombs were civilians. What were the others? Does Palestine have an army?
By guntotinganglion, March 13 at 5:04 pm # I’m adding one more thought that just can’t be avoided in this discussion. If the US, uses first strike nukes against a non-nuclear state, we will go down in history as the most evil nation in history. And, when a man like Bush, refers to these as “weapons of mass murder” and then uses them, what does that make him? Even Howard can add 2 + 2. He uses weapons of mass murder (HIS WORDS), he is by definition, a mass murderer. He said it, not me. Is there any way to put this more simply? Perhaps only that (even considering) the use of these monstrous weapons is a sin, and a crime against humanity. I know Bush was a “history major”, but clearly he learned nothing whatsoever from history. The holocausts that were ignited over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should have ended any discussion of future use, since so many innocent people died so horrifically. The US became a terror state when it used those weapons of terror and mass murder, especially since they were unnecessary, since the Japanese were defeated, and all the US had to do was wait them out. That act was specifically meant as the starting gun for the Cold War, and it’s only purpose was to warn the Soviets against trying to tangle with the US...and we see how well that went. First strike will seal the fate of this country, because the entire sane world will turn against us. Insane states like Israel will applaud, but they will also face the wrath of the world as a whole. Using nukes against the USSR was always considered to be MAD, and it was accepted that it should NEVER happen, by sane human beings anyway. And they could hit back. Iran has no such defense, they can’t hit back. But, they can do other things that will change this world in profound ways. I hope doomsday isn’t around the corner, but we have a doomsday President who thinks it would be “cool” to use the one weapon he’s been denied...weapons of mass murder. And if he does, history will remember him as the mass murderer that he is.
By Xenophon, March 13 at 4:16 pm # Desert Gods = DeathHi, psychos! Check this out…
By Winston, March 13 at 7:16 am # “In my work with the defendants (at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949), I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it. A lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.” -- Captain G. M. Gilbert, Army psychologist assigned to interview and analyze the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials
By AwakeAndAriseOrg, March 13 at 4:36 am # LDS Church President Spencer W. Kimball in 1976, not speaking favorably of his own “flock” and people, nor of the United States in that Bicentennial year said this: “When I review the performance of this people..., I am appalled and frightened. “We are a warlike people, easily distracted from our assignment of preparing for the coming of the Lord. When enemies rise up, we commit vast resources to the fabrication of gods of stone and steel—ships, planes, missiles, fortifications—and depend on them for protection and deliverance. When threatened, we become anti-enemy instead of pro-kingdom of God; we train a man in the art of war and call him a patriot, thus, in the manner of Satan’s counterfeit of true patriotism, perverting the Savior’s teaching: “ ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; “ ‘That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven’ (Matthew 5:44-45). “
By Ryan Hartman, March 11 at 7:47 am # ObviousChris Hedges is a writer whose articles should be on page one of every major newspaper. When that day comes, we will all wake up.
By Jimbo, March 11 at 6:25 am # I claim nothing. I just have one question: If Hamas stopped sending rockets into Israel, wouldn’t the counter-attacks and the block of fuel and supplies to Gaza stop as well? (This is a real question. I am actually curious what different people have to say.)
By guntotinganglion, March 10 at 7:38 pm # Israeli’s hide behind civilians as well. Military installations are positioned in civilian areas. Odd too, that during the Lebanese slaugher last year, the “surgical” precision of the Israeli weapons produced FAR more civilian casualties than the Qassam rockets ever did. Also, the Qassam rockets amazingly, considering they were unguided, consistently hit near Israeli military installations that just happened to be in civilian areas. So...apparently it doesn’t go both ways. If the Lebanese, or let’s just call them all Dr. Evil...if Dr. Evil has a rocket launcher near homes, he’s using human shields, but if Dr. Good (Israel) has tanks and launchers within civilian areas, it’s what? Never human shields...cause the honorable IDF would never do that. Dr. Evil is evil, Dr. Good is good, it’s just that simple....minded. Pull your head out...it’s a frightening world, but it’s best to see it as it is, rather than the cartoonish hellscape you make up in your mind. Should we discuss the half a million cluster weapons that the brave IDF scattered across southern Lebanon in the closing hours of that conflict? These weapons kill far more indiscriminately than the Qassam rockets. And these weapons bear a remarkable resemblance to a similar terror weapons deployed by the Nazi’s over London during the blitz. They purposefully designed them to look like toys, and were designed to be unexploded ordinance...they weren’t meant to explode, at least not at first. They were designed to attract children, who would then take the small interesting looking “toys” home with them, and play with them, until they were jostled just so, and blew the child to pieces. This is what the high dud rate in cluster weapons is for...to terrorize innocent populations, and to spread fear and terror far and wide, and to tie up medical infrastructure when grievous injuries are survived! And these terror weapons were deployed far and wide across southern Lebanon as the time was running out, and the “brave” IDF knew their last hope was terror. So, they used artillery pieces to fire these hideous weapons over cities and towns, in fields and streams, in trees and bushes, for children to find, take home, and blow themselves and their families apart. Most of the time however, they simply died when they touched them. Israeli’s should be very proud. Their amoral superiority is complete. These are weapons of pure evil. And, they are banned by international law. That of course doesnt’ stop Israel, and never has, and never will, as long at the brutes who are running things now remain in power!
By guntotinganglion, March 10 at 7:12 pm # Howard, are you blind? Can you not see the world around you? Both sides are committing acts of brutality, but Israel is killing FAR MORE Palestinians than the other way round. The eight Torah students were murdered, how many innocent Palestinian civilians were murdered that same day, or the day before, or the day after? Your ethical blindness, and many others, is why this butchery continues on both sides. The attitude that “they” “...celebrate death, despise democracy and seek Israel’s destruction” sounds a lot like, “they hate us for our freedom!”. It sounds a lot like the justifications that have gone on for thousands of years, made manifest by cartoonishly caricaturized bad guys, who are pure evil and can never be reasoned with. Did you NOT read Christopher Hedges article? Both sides are populated by human beings, who are THE SAME in every respect, other than the circumstances of their birth. If you shoot a man’s brother, he will attempt to hurt or kill you, and on, and on, and on it goes, as it always has gone. War’s to end wars never end wars, they only further the brutality of the NEXT wars. And turning your “enemies” into cardboard cutouts without humanity, justifies their killing...and this statement applies in BOTH directions, to Israelis and Palestinians alike! I’m not sure why I’m trying. Your mind is obviously sealed, but as Hedges says, there’s a dearth of empathy in this world, and unfortunately, I have empathy for both sides in an awful, endless reign of brutality. And in this reign, Israel is the all powerful in it’s own mind, and in it’s military might provided greatly by the Unites States. No such advantage goes to the Palestinians. They fire blind, Israel uses “smart” weapons with so called surgical precision...and the damn patient dies every time! These surgically precise weapons in reality, have all the effectivity of a chainsaw for a brain surgeon! I guess the final question is, would you support a “final solution” to the Palestinian “problem”? Vilnai apparently would. Would you cheer, as the murderers of the Torah students did, as a mushroom cloud rises over Gaza? This may well be the future, and if it is, Israel will have damned itself for all eternity. It’s time for peacekeepers to find peace, and warmakers to find the door. These are not cardboard cutouts they putting holes in, these are men, women, children, babies and the unborn, who NEVER HURT ANYONE!!! The people you vilify, are the tiniest fraction of the 1.5 million people being starved in Gaza. Will this insanity never end? Where’s Solomon when you need him? Can reason ever hold sway? History seems to indicate not. I hope history is wrong, for the sake of the innocents on both sides of this expanding bloodbath.
By Seltzer, March 10 at 2:21 pm # I’m saddened to see that yet again, a reasonably argued online column by an intelligent writer is tarnished by flame-throwing respondents. We don’t have to agree on this or any other issue, but how can we ever expect to solve anything by name-calling and hate-speak? Some examples of such, as shown above: “To them, murder is acceptable so long as it is justified in the eyes of the executor.” “Poor ‘senior fellow/Distinguished Fellow’ Chris Hedges...”
By Joe, March 10 at 1:29 pm # Chris Hedges is a wise and valuable asset to our tortured world.
By Kwagmyre, March 10 at 11:21 am # If or when reason somehow prevails in that troubled area of the world, it will be obvious that only a single state solution is the permanent Rx for a lasting peace. The end of Apartheid in South Africa has demonstrated that as nothing else could.
By guntotinganglion, March 10 at 9:45 am # PP's (Psychopathic Personalities)The wisdom of Solomon is a thing of the past. Amoral troglodytes rule now, in Israel and America, with an iron fist. When Vilnai made his reprehensible, repugnant statement about the holocaust, nuclear weapons came to mind. I don’t doubt that any of these cavemen would use WMD to gain a “final solution” to all these miseries in the Middle East. Thank you Christopher for attempting to remind people how powerful empathy can be. Sadly, psychopaths are incapable of empathy, and ALL of these proto-humans are psychopathic.
By bozhidar bob balkas, March 10 at 6:38 am # arafat, abbas just like geronimo, said/say, I'l fightit can be educed that, once 1 collates all the salient facts, that the warpeace process now 100yrs old, will go on for decades at least. thus, what is abbas, the cadger, to lose by cadging? PA get’s some money out of all this. the record is well known, but in toto skirted by zions and their supporters. isr holds thousands of captives w.o. trial or lawyers. pals hold 1, but w. a lawyer. demolition of homes, orchards, villages, in isr’s favor, expulsion by warfare/terrorism, restriction of movement also in favor of isr by a ratio 100% to zero%. then we h. walls, blockades, killings/maimings. the only crime pals guilty of is their maimings/kllings. pals lesser crimes r property damage and being stubborn to leave en masse. but who leaves 1’s HHH? (home,hearth,habitat? thank u.
By sunzen, March 10 at 5:52 am # war is rawA world without empathy creates war. War is hate realized. Add Your Comment |
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Newsroom Carnage Continues at The Washington Post
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