Global

Oh Lord, kumbaya . . .

As I absorb the daily news of war and global devastation, I sing these words to myself — quietly, yes, secretly, lest I ignite instant flash-bang sarcasm from the surrounding world. What next? A flower in a rifle barrel?

Sarcasm spits in the face of idealism — a.k.a., “feelgood-ism” — and life goes on. Any questions? Sure, war is hell and all that, especially when the bad guys wage it, but sitting around the campfire and lamenting musically for global niceness is a sin against our military budget. Don’t be silly. We need to protect ourselves.

‘All we can do for Gaza is just offer our Du’a.” This is an oft-repeated statement by enraged Arabs and Muslims who feel helpless before the Israeli genocide in Gaza. 

 But is it true that only invocations and supplications are possible, as tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are being killed and wounded by the Israeli war machine? 

 No. There is much that can be done and, in fact, many people around the world are already doing it. 

Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom.

 In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’, summing up the Palestinian problem in the claim that ‘five million Palestinians are (..) trapped because of bad leadership’, not the Israeli occupation or US support for Israel. 

Jeffrey Sachs interviews Norman Solomon about War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine