Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday, receiving not a fraction of the attention Western officials have given six Israeli hostages, writes Caitlin Johnstone.
300 Days of Genocide rally in Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown on Aug. 20. (Diane Krauthamer, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com.au
Listen to Tim Foley reading this article.
You never see the dehumanization of Palestinians in Western society exhibited so clearly as when something bad happens to Israelis during the genocidal assault on Gaza.
Western officials have been publicly weeping about six dead Israeli hostages, including one Israeli-American, who the IDF says were recently killed by Hamas.
Whoever’s been writing President Joe Biden’s press releases for him published a statement about how “devastated and outraged” the president is about the death of the American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
The statement says the president knows Goldberg-Polin’s parents, saying, “I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express” and that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
“I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death,” the statement reads, which for the record is a lie — the Biden administration has been collaborating with Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage a hostage deal at every turn.
? Scoop from @jeremyscahill: Internal ceasefire documents show the talks ought to have effectively revolved on July 2, when Hamas accepted the ceasefire-hostage framework put forward by Israel and the US on June 24.
The US has since allowed Netanyahu to undermine the deal,… pic.twitter.com/WkCZAJAJKR
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) September 1, 2024
Similar sentiments are being expressed in statements by Western officials like Vice President Kamala Harris, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
All of these statements frame the deaths of these six Israeli hostages as an earth-shakingly horrific tragedy, and all frame Hamas as a band of evil villains who must be brought to justice for their crimes.
No similar statements have ever been made by any of these officials about the far, far greater number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by the state of Israel with their assistance.
No similar expressions of condolence have ever been uttered by these leaders for the millions of Palestinians who’ve had their lives completely ruined by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank over the last 11 months, or for the untold thousands of parents who’ve had to bury children who were exterminated in Israel’s genocidal onslaught.
Western government officials are making it clear that they do not see Palestinians as human in the same way they see Israelis as human, as are the mass media propaganda institutions who’ve been covering the deaths of these hostages with an intensity never seen regarding the IDF’s daily massacres of civilians in Gaza.
Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday, receiving not the tiniest fraction of the attention as those six Israeli hostages.
Israel Kills 47 More Palestinians in Gaza, Recorded Death Toll Passes 40,700
One strike targeted a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City
by Dave DeCamp@DecampDave #Gaza #Palestinians #Israel #GazaCeasefireNow https://t.co/kaAKG0Vsvh pic.twitter.com/mKS06EbJhk— Antiwar.com (@Antiwarcom) September 1, 2024
The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be. An Israeli dying should matter as much to you as your own family or friends dying, while a Palestinian dying should be regarded as a routine and natural event like a drop of rain falling from the sky.
And that’s important indoctrination for Westerners.
Can you imagine if we all started caring about Western bombs being dropped in the Middle East as much as we would care if they were being dropped on our own country, or on a country we’ve been conditioned to sympathize with?
All their carefully manufactured consent would crumble, and people would cease allowing the western empire to do what it needs to do to dominate the planet.
These people are actively working to subvert our basic sense of human empathy. To twist our psyches into being unable to recognize the same level of humanity among empire-targeted populations as empire-supported ones.
To see authorized populations as worthy of care and sympathy, and to see unauthorized populations as vermin in need of extermination.
Yes, our rulers really are that evil, and so are the propagandists who run the mass media.
So today I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the millions of Palestinians who’ve lost loved ones and had their lives thrown to the winds of chaos by Israel’s Western-backed campaign of extermination, ethnic cleansing and terrorism.
And I would like to remind my readers that Israel has exponentially more hostages than Hamas has, and murders them routinely, and rapes and tortures them constantly.
And it is right that we should care deeply about that. Even if the people who rule over us do not.
Caitlin Johnstone’s work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following her onFacebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, YouTube, or throwing some money into her tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy her books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff she publishes is to subscribe to the mailing list at her website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything she publishes. For more info on who she is, where she stands and what she’s trying to do with her platform, click here. All works are co-authored with her American hU.S.band Tim Foley.
This article is from CaitlinJohnstone.com.au and re-published with permission.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Genocidal atrocities committed by the AngloEuroZionists are the monstrous symptom of the dying Western Empire, founded on the very same genocidal atrocities and now decomposing from its own fundamental rot.
History is written by the victors and Caitlin Johnstone, a moral victor, is one of the authors.
Remember Gonzalo Lira?
If given the option, most Israelis would push a button if it would automatically exterminate all Palestinians. This isn’t an anti-Semitic opinion, it’s been openly stated by Israeli podcasters (see Jonathan Cook’s Twitter feed).
So, we have a deathly serious problem with Jewish supremacism that must be dealt with by education and activism.
For further reading:
“Jewish History, Jewish Religion” by Israel Shahak
“The Wandering Who?” by Gilad Atzmon
“Holocaust Industry” by Norman Finkelstein
Israelis and Zionist American Jews that I’ve run into over the years always have shown a visceral hatred for Palestinians in particular and Muslims in general. I understand that nearly all Israelis now feel this way and support genocide/ethnic cleansing. People need to go deeper into understanding Israeli culture. Can people find meaning based on hatred? It seems to be the case.
One of the British journalists recently detained under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act of 2000 was reportedly asked, “Why do you believe Palestinians are better than white people?”
Where’s our humanity?
“Because so many Western white people are such self-centered manipulable scum” was that his/her/choose-your-pronoun helpful and honest answer?
Our western religious war system demands good and evils so we can ignore the fine points of innocent civilians and violent inhumane death and injury. Monotheism gives us broad latitude in order not to get in the way of our military profit motives and send off our not so innocents to their rewards in heavenly Roman/Viking style or live to fight smother day again in our permanent war world. Perhaps the priests were always there to serve the pharaohs or sometimes rule them too..
Spot on, Caitlin Johnston! It seems pretty obvious that the crushing of dissent now occurring in the West is not only to prop up the non-democratic powers under whose iron rule we are allowed to rot while paying their way for them, but also to provide the means for a future State worship. Freedom of speech is now the freedom to worship the State. Freedom to worship is now the freedom to worship the State that provides your right to worship it. I see a future POTUS reigning over us as a god supreme, and if he or she has machines controlled by AI cleansing the air we need for our survival, or maybe just aiming warheads at countries we are told to hate, then I guess that POTUS is as good as a god anyway. The Five Eyes and the other lackeys we control through threatened sanctions or other monetary means – they are only here to supply needed strategic resources, as well as to test the template needed for democracy to be slowly undone. Like a wounded animal, the US is crawling towards its den and shouting for those to follow who do not want to incur it’s wasting wrath. There will be many people deemed “not human” by our country in those years shortly to come – people across the globe, as well as those just beyond the fences guarding our own backyards.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable to point out that the Palestinians being brutalized and killed by Israelis are brown.
It’s the white supremacist side of settler/colonial late-state capitalism.
This is silly. It has nothing to do with skin color. Many Israelis have similar coloration. It is culture and religion that determines Israeli visceral hatred for Palestinians. Reducing everything to skin color needlessly divides us.
Gaza has less square miles than my California county. 47 county people killed in 24 hours by outside forces would be pure’murder’ to me. For this to happen days upon days, months upon months would mean to me the end of civilization. The US helps that happen in Gaza.
The west has always dehumanized people, including their own poor and working citizens. I’m not saying only the west does this, but these are the people who feel they have a right to steal, pillage, murder people they consider “inferior.” Please don’t describe the crimes to me that occurred hundreds of years ago; we are talking about NOW. I find the attitudes of many Europeans — wherever on the globe they have sprouted like mold — to be provincial, gullible, unfeeling, uncaring, always ready to believe any half-baked propaganda that makes them feel superior.
I have little sympathy with idiots like the German who wrote, “We’re rich,” basically saying that makes Germans better than Russians or Chinese people. I remember my Czech exchange student telling me that the German exchange students had only one topic: $$$$$. There is slight schadenfreude watching their economies tank and their governments turn openly fascist.
Since black people are 3/5 human in the USA Palestinians must be 2/5 human. White people go figure.
According to Biased Broad-Casting (BBC) today, Vladimir Putin’s visit to Mongolia was a show of brazen defiance of the ICC’s ruling against governments’ individual ‘war criminal’ leaders, when they elect to travel abroad.
Whereas when Netanyahu recently visited the U.S. to speak before an American Israel Public Affairs Committee (A.I.P.A.C.) purloined American peoples’ Congress, he was lauded (50-plus times) for his defiance of the ICC’s ruling against him, by the majority of both houses’ members.
Double standards and hypocrisy go hand-in-hand as partners in international criminality
The ICC has not made a decision yet whether to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.
Isn’t about time they got off the stick and did so?
The disparity between treatment of Putin and Netanyahu demonstrates that the ICC does not value human lives equally.
Whose are the ‘hands and minds’ behind the institutional facades that strategize, decide and implement the constructs of law, inequitably?
Are they not of us mere mortals?
Mortals without morals in this case.
A mass boycott of BBC TV license is what’s needed. I’m sick and tired of their lies and propaganda regarding events in Ukraine & occupied Palestine.
They were also silent on Julian Assange throughout his ordeal. The bbc is nothing but a mouthpiece of the state