Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
The Executioner’s Song – by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
in Doha, Qatar
Original to ScheerPost
I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza.
He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It is night. Israeli tanks fire directly towards the hospital compound. Long horizontal red flashes. A deliberate attack on a hospital. A deliberate war crime. A deliberate massacre of the most helpless civilians, including the very sick and infants. Then the feed goes dead.
[Israeli troops have since invaded the hospital itself and are in the midst of an operation there.]
We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die.
And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable.
Nothing justifies this. Nothing. President Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza.
We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter.
To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try to take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.
"Let Israel finish the job!"
A genocidal message is held aloft at a pro-Israel march in Washington, DC, today. pic.twitter.com/gtfLF0M327
— Lowkey (@Lowkey0nline) November 14, 2023
No Values
We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter.
We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day, including 160 children.
#German Chancellor Olaf Scholz says #Israel is acting by international law in defending itself.
In international law targeting civilians is forbidden, the death toll in Gaza is 11,200 civilians, 5000 of whom are children. pic.twitter.com/Aj5Wq3N7VD
— Quds News Network (@QudsNen) November 14, 2023
Israel reacted with indignation and moral outrage when it was accused of bombing the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza, which left hundreds of dead. The bombing, Israel claimed, came from an errant rocket fired by Palestine Islamic Jihad. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that struck the hospital.
The Israeli Military and Government Lie
Those of us who have covered Gaza have heard this Israel trope so many times it is risible. They always blame Hamas and the Palestinians for their war crimes, now attempting to argue that hospitals are Hamas command centers and therefore legitimate targets. They never provide evidence. The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has staff working in Al-Shifa, issued a statement saying patients, doctors and nurses are “trapped in hospitals under fire.” It called on the “Israeli government to cease this unrelenting assault on Gaza’s health system.”
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment. Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries,” the statement read.
“The hostilities around the hospital have not stopped. MSF teams and hundreds of patients are still inside Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.”
Three other hospitals in northern Gaza and Gaza City are encircled by Israeli forces and tanks, in what a doctor told Al Jazeera was a “day of war against hospitals.” The Indonesian Hospital has reportedly also lost power. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 20 of 36 hospitals in Gaza no longer function.
Aerial picture of the Indonesian Hospital taken by the Israeli forces on Nov. 1. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly.
Humanitarian corridors? Pauses in the shelling? These are vehicles to facilitate the total depopulation of northern Gaza.
The handful of aid trucks allowed through the border at Rafah with Egypt? A public relations gimmick. There is only one goal — kill, kill, kill.
The faster the better.
All Biden officials talk about is what comes next once Israel has finished its decimation of Gaza. They know Israel’s slaughter will not end until Gazans are living in the open without shelter in the southern part of the strip and dying because of a lack of food, water and medical care.
Palestine solidarity march in London on Oct. 9. (Alisdare Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)
Gaza before Israel’s ground incursion was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. Imagine what will happen with 1.1 million Gazans from the north piled on top of over 1 million in the south.
Imagine what will take place when infectious diseases such as cholera become an epidemic. Imagine the ravages of starvation.
The pressure will build to do something. And that something, Israel hopes, will be to push the Palestinians over the border into the Sinai in Egypt. Once there, they will never return. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be complete. Its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will begin.
That is Israel’s demented dream. To achieve it, they will make Gaza uninhabitable.
Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors?
If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show “The Chris Hedges Report.”
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, “The Chris Hedges Report.”
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The US/UK/EU are now genocide states, actively financing, arming, facilitating and enabling genocide.
And there will be a very heavy price to pay for this.
No torrent of lies, no multi million pound hasbara, no amount of disinformation from the Whores Of Zion who claim to be our politicians, or their bought and paid for hack stenographers in the lying corporate media, can any longer obscure this simple fact.
The consequences of all this may not be immediately apparent and will take many years to fully play out.
The era of the Golden Billion is coming to an end.
This latest in an endless catalogue of recent barbaric episodes will serve merely to accelerate their inevitable collapse.
The rest of the planet has had a bellyful of their arrogance, hypocrisy and barbarism.
A lot of pigeons are coming home to roost.
It may be that the rest of the planet will inflict a small part of the suffering on it that the Golden Billion has inflicted on the rest of humanity for so long.
Nothing could be so richly deserved.
We have to bomb Yugoslavia because there is a genocide happening …
We have to bomb Iraq because Saddam will do genocide with his WMDs …
We have to bomb Syria because Assad is doing genocode with chemical weapons…
We have to bomb Libya because Gaddafi is genociding with Viagra …
We have to bomb Gaza because Israel is doing genocide of people in Gaza
Wait a minute, is there something wrong in western logic. Of course the first four claims were pretenses/lies but still the thinking is pathetic and evil.
I hate my country Finland because they are doing nothing. We have been natostizied and our conscience is dead.
Where can you get those magnificent and shocking works of art by Mr. Fish?
clowncrack.com There’s a shop on here.
The decisions of the Nuremberg tribunals continue to be not only ignored but thoroughly rejected by every government allied with the United States and especially by the countries that insisted on them in the first place which makes a mockery of all the men and women who lost their lives in the second “war to end all wars” as well as of the United Nations Charter, the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights and International Law. So, just who were the bad guys in that and the myriad ensuing conflict? Who are the bad guys today? Does the concept even exist in a world were truth is less than irrelevant?
Yes, you nailed it Mr. Mahé. Could WWII have been a sham? Were we played then as we are being played now? One needs to look no further than what the Allies did to Dresden to realize war dehumanizes the participants. However, Gaza is not a war it is genocide… a veritable holocaust… the depravity and lack of humanity dignity lives one.
The participants in this ongoing genocide have failed to realize how these actions have defined them to the world…
As always Chris understands and expresses what is happening in the Gaza and the parties behind it perfectly. Thank you Chris. I wished we had more people like him in this world.
ONE MORE TIME… RightWingJoe SHOULD be remembered for the Ukraine Deaths… for: Barisma $$$!
What is inconsistent about applying & supporting the Same Values as applied to an Israeli Land Grab?
Vicious and cowardly. Sadistic and afraid of exposure. Monstrous beyond fathoming and “morally” righteous. “Victims” who employ victimhood to rationalize victimization. Criminals guilty of the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, cynically pimping out the Holocaust as a preemptive full-stop PR mechanism. Israel and The United States represent the moral nadir of powers in the world. There are, of course, others equally hideous. Saudi Arabia has committed similar crimes against humanity in Yemen – also armed by the U.S.A. But the blood red spotlight is on a latter day Third Reich and it’s fast friend of convenience and benefactor. Something is shattering, besides the heads of Palestinians under mountains of rubble. The apartheid state’s mask – always translucent, at best – is off in what amounts to grisly exhibitionism. Only pro-Israel fanatics, howling for the settler-colonial state to “finish the job”, believe the Hasbara or it’s righteous cause of exterminating all brutes. EVIL is the only word that, if used judiciously, expresses what Israel is, has always been, and is unleashing on women, children, the elderly, sick and dieing, this minute. And a majority of human beings are screaming about it; while a majority of Western nations spew drivel about “Israel’s right to defend itself” or a “humanitarian pause.” What is shattering is a status quo that has somehow been maintained for three quarters of a century. Perhaps it is wishful thinking, but it seems inconceivable that Israel can dust itself off after this. After this second Final Solution, this Naqba II, to continue as it has been. A shattering has already occurred. And the damage it has wrought upon it’s victims and itself will likely bring this abomination to an end – along with every world leader who has incriminated themselves by their support for a genocide.
I’m old. Ex PCorps V. Among so many feelings, so many, I am astonished, stunned and un-comprehending at my country. And at Europe. I was a child safe in school. No mass murders. And the viciousness of the Nazi’s was held in utter contempt and utter condemnation. And here now my country is a Nazi and this time the victim is a Palestinian, and most likely a baby Palestinian. And an Israeli who is likely Jewish is bombing a Palestinian hospital. When did the worm turn? Biden’s placement of our country in the unspeakable is a turning point. A marker. Something broke when Reagan fired the striking air controllers. Relationship.Degraded. Something broke when the Powell Memorandum circulated. Something broke with NAFTA. A cold entered civic political life. The Corporate Beast of Mammon is All. Mass murders of little children. Militarization of home town police. Etc And now it’s official. Baby killing is ok. Aligning with an authoritarian murderous ethnic “cleanser” fits our values. It’s out now. Corporate ethos has won. A human is as valuable as it is commodifiable. An object thing with a price. Baby is now a little object thing. Or in Bibi’s view precious if Israeli Jewish; if Other as in Palistinian then a mere baby human animal. And for Biden a little Palestinian baby is superfluous to maintaining the singular importance of being the boss of the world a la Wolfowitz. Ethnic cleansing? Sure! Why not? Any deal with the devil will do if it keeps us on top! The Humanities never got us anywhere. Food for fools. Not for the real man. Stupendously pathetic.
and now they’re leaving this hospital, apparently because they didn’t find any weapons – hxxps://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/israeli-forces-withdraw-from-al-shifa-having-not-found-any-w
I’d start with the Mayflower myself…..
Thank you so much for telling the truth. It is painful to see the U.S., the U.K. and most of Europe be accomplices to genocide. It violates everything I ever believed in about the U.S. as one of its citizens and breaks my heart as it does millions of others. The Western world has truly gone mad and I don’t think there is a way back. As a people we have jumped into the abyss and without calling on theology, if there is karma, an energy in the world that balances life forces, it will take many more generations to heal this horror. We are as primitive as we ever were underneath the skin, and the manmade laws which no one is paying attention to at all. “forgive them for they know not what they do” but they do know, and don’t care: it’s my way or the highway meaning death to those who don’t agree. Barbarians s Freud once indicated.
Mr. Hedges,
Please see this: hxxps://www.instagram.com/reel/CzjZ4zCPtOb/?igshid=MTc4MmM1YmI2Ng==
Looks like those brave, armed to the teeth, Israeli kiddie-killers are back on the job. In this situation words are pretty much useless since we are not dealing with human beings but with relentless killing machines, machines which stop at nothing – not even children. But we should have known better, and there must be no surrender to the forces of darkness. As Mattias simply puts it ”I wanted my sovereignty back; I did not want to feel indebted to and complicit in a financial system that, in my view, played a part in the social impasse that was/is about to occur.
This is nothing new for our country. In Afghanistan, we had purposefully targeted not only civilians, but the medical responders coming to their aid — this was confirmed by Reality Winner’s leaks that were published by Wikileaks, and (independently?) by the Washington Post in its “Afghanistan Papers” series. And we are also old hands at genocide, having assisted Saudi Arabia in its war to wipe out the Yemenis. In Gaza, we are giving the IDF access to our satellite pictures and military analysts in actively helping them to identify and obliderate targets. We are not merely looking the other way at genocide and ethnic cleansing — we are actively participating in and perpetrating it.
I believe the only thing that will move Biden is a threat to his dream of another term. Perhaps Consortium could start a pledge movement where people swear not to vote for Biden because of his refusal to condition Israel support, weapons, and money going forward on an instant ceasefire. It should be worded in such a way that there is no promise to vote for him if he does. As far as I am concerned he has already damned himself many times over.
I’m in!! I wasn’t going to vote for him anyway, and didn’t the first time, but I like your idea of a pledge.
I am beyond shocked when I talked to my sisters and they all told me they’re going to vote for Biden “because Trump”. Then they, to a woman, blamed Jill Stein and Ralph Nader for Democratic fails in 2016 and 2000. Give me a break.
I too will not vote for Biden. I simply won’t vote. Biden calls himself a Zionist and we know what they did in 1948. This supposedly devout Catholic who suffered the death of his first wife and daughter has lost his soul to the Israeli government. If there is an afterlife he will be in a circle of hell
Have been thinking of writing Julian Assange.
I never “voted” for Biden. Don’t like Biden and the Ds? whaddya gonna do? vote Republican? Let’s not forget what Jimmy Carter said: “The US is an oligarchy with unlimited political bribery”.
As a symbolic gesture, I write-in candidates. I am told that I “wasted my vote”. What kind of “democracy” is that?
We need to demand electoral reform. Abolish the first-past-the-post/ winner-takes-all electoral system for starters. We should have Ranked Choice/Instant Runoff to start with and then go from there.
Genocide Joe’s record at home …..
1,000,000 dead from COVID.
Declining life expectancy for Americans
Rising Deaths of Despair
Rising Childhood Mortality
Rising ‘Occupational’ deaths.
Genocide Joe, keeping the crematorium fires burning through the nights, at home and abroad.
Genocide Joe, we can’t afford four more years.
Biden (D) is not an ‘accomplice’ to genocide. He is the authority behind genocide. Genocide Joe is the Leader of the Free World. He is not merely an accomplice. Genocide Joe is the leader of a powerful nation that is paying some $17 billion this year to Israel. Genocide Joe has ships likely armed with nuclear weapons threatening shock and awe upon any who try to intervene to stop the genocide.
Genocide Joe is the the Big Guy calling the shots, not just the mere supplier of the weapons and driver of the getaway car. ‘Criminal Mastermind’ is a closer description than mere ‘accomplice’.
It is to the eternal shame of the US that we continue to support this savage massacre in Gaza. It could be stopped with a phone call, telling the arch-criminal Netanyahu that ALL support, financial and military, would cease if the onslaught continues. But Biden, and his ‘advisors,’ their hands soaked with blood, will do nothing of the sort. What is bewildering is that this suppression and killing of Palestinians has continued decade after decade, without realizing that it only will continue these cycles of violence, and the death of thousands of innocents. For the geniuses guiding this continued genocide, one has to ask, Have they learned nothing from their Sisyphean folly?
CAsk yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors?”
At the recent Riyadh summit, Gulf States rejected/fended off the Iranian call to arm Palestinians. I wonder why they would do that.
“The definition of a radical is someone who looks at the structural effects of policy”
Dr. Michael Parenti
Truth in other words. Someone who can understand what their eyes see.
Parenti is excellent. I read “Against Empire” several years ago. Highly recommended. But that was written in the mid 90’s, and all his acumen can’t stop the course of history as it is now being written by fools. Get ready for those things you couldn’t believe would happen to happen – not because they were inevitable, but because power only writes the future it wants to see. The Praetorian Guard in Rome chose five of the last seven Caesars. Our military industrial complex and the surveillance state behind it will elect every president in the US for a long time to come. Democracy, it turns out, is only a boondoggle for those who are willing to advertise something else completely oppositional to it.
Biden won’t be haunted by anything, he’s a corrupt dithering dolt who has no grasp of his faculties. He’ll go doddering into his death barely knowing what the hell he ever did to the Palestinians in Gaza.
The sociopathic maniacs who should be haunted for the rest of their lives — but won’t be — are the sick Zio-con parasites who devise and run cover for this entire grotesquery: Blinken, Sullivan, Bill Kristol, Benocide Shapiro, Chucky Schumer, Hannity, Dershowitz (I never took my underwear off), Nuland, the Kagan clan, Eli David, and some others I’m forgetting at the moment.
The only thing these creepy arrogant fascist supremacists listen to or respond to is force and violence, that’s it! Hundreds of thousands of us in the streets of London, NYC or DC does absolutely nothing. We must support Hamas and we must support any liberation struggle on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians that militarily targets Tel Aviv; otherwise we’ll eventually see 2 million Palestinians living in filth and squalor in the Sanai!
“and some others I’m forgetting at the moment”
Well there’s Netanyahu, and the western sycophant/arse-licking (language is important) money grubbers in the EU/UK.
“He’ll go doddering into his death barely knowing what the hell he ever did to the Palestinians in Gaza.”
Or the rest of the planet.
Yep! Netanyahu of course and the coterie of hardcore Zio sadists in Tel Aviv.
And all that human tragedy because the West wants to take control of the gas in the Coast of Gaza…
Not just that. The gas and the idea for the new canal are bonuses. This has been going on for generations. One more bonus in the twisted minds of THE BLOB or MICIMATT is to use this ‘crisis’ as an excuse to either do regime change in Iran, or kill all the Iranians in the attempt.
I have no words left for this. I cannot imagine how hard it is for Chris Hedges and a few others to watch this and THEN have to write about it. And do it so well. The emotional exhaustion has to be horrendous.