Welcome to America's Gaza

[UPDATE II :: No First Amendment Rights for "war combatants"]

What happened to the Palestinian people in the so-called occupied territories, primarily in Gaza is exactly what is happening in America and for basically the very same reasons. First lets demonstrate the complete disconnect in reality when dealing with two similar peoples. Barack Obama says, when discussing the beheading death of James Foley Wednesday, August 20, 2014 by the Islamic State:

"They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people. So ISIL speaks for no religion. Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just god would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior." 

Now look at a similar people, as Obama characterizes, driven by nihilistic ideologies.  They conduct themselves in the same barbaric hateful terroristic ways, just change a couple of his words:

(Nihilism: 1. total rejection of established laws and institutions. 2. anarchy, terrorism, or other revolutionary activity. 3. total and absolute destructiveness, especially toward the world at large and including oneself.)

Let’s be clear about Israel (ISIL). They have rampaged across cities and villages killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Palestinian Muslims, both Sunni and Shia), by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can, for no other reason than they practice a different religion."

The only real difference in the beheading of innocent people between ISIL and Israel is that Israel doesn't behead with a knife. They are far more sophisticated and efficient - their barbarism is an art form. While the literal slaughter of the Palestinian people by Israel is about as depraved and abhorrent as it can get, it is the literal destruction of a whole generation of Palestinian Gazans that is the reality. To see exactly how just read the interview on Democracy Now with Pernille Ironside, chief of UNICEF’s Gaza field office.

Pernille Ironside: "Today, the future of Palestinian children in Gaza is extraordinarily bleak. The entire population has experienced a deep form of trauma, and there isn’t a single family in Gaza who hasn’t experienced personally death, injury, the loss of their home, extensive damage, displacement. The psychological toll that has on a people, it just cannot be overestimated, and especially on children. I’ve met children who have experienced extraordinary wounds, who have watched as family members were dismembered before their eyes, obliterated. You know, shortly after that terrible incident on the beach." *** "Across from the al-Deira Hotel and where four children were killed. And I met with the surviving three boys, who had watched and who had just barely escaped with their lives. They were in a deep state of trauma. I mean, the impact and the type of weaponry that’s being used is literally shredding and obliterating people, and particularly children, who are so small and vulnerable." [Emphasis mine]

Barack Obama managed to speak some words of truth when he said what needs to be done to resolve the "cancer" threatening all humanity:

From governments and peoples across the Middle East, there has to be a common effort to extract this cancer so that it does not spread. There has to be a clear rejection of this kind of nihilistic ideologies. One thing we can all agree on is that a group like Israel (ISIL) has no place in the 21st century. Friends and allies around the world, we share a common security and a common set of values that are rooted in the opposite of what we saw yesterday (and today). And we will continue to confront this hateful terrorism and replace it with a sense of hope and civility.

Gaza body count mounts to 2,065 as Israel intensifies attacks - Press TV
In photos: Gaza families return home to horror and devastation - EI
As war rages in Gaza, West Bank routine of violence and arrests unabated - HAARATZ

"Arrests, expulsions, home demolitions, land seizure and settlers harassing Palestinians continues: Since the beginning of the fighting in the south on July 8, soldiers and police have injured 2,139 Palestinians in the West Bank."

So, what is the American Gaza? Take a good look. This is not where it ends, but it is not where it starts either.

Ferguson shooting & protests - CNN
Racial Repression and the Murder of Mike Brown - Why Words of Reconciliation Ring Hollow - CounterPunch
Second fatal St Louis area shooting stokes tensions in Ferguson - The Guardian
Ferguson: No justice in American police state - Press TV: 

"Today, Americans have no more protection against state violence than Germans had under National Socialism."

It starts here, with people like these bigoted, racist thugs. Here is just one example, Eric Kirk in his own words on his own blog, read the comments, full of nothing more than rote propaganda and moronic stupidity, hate and violence:

August 20, 2014 at 10:10 am 

Eric Kirk

Its one more example that your superficial encounters with American Jewish people are worse than useless as a basis to characterize Israeli society. To my mind, your lumping together Jews of different nationality as to their social and cultural practices, is a form of antisemitism. Though I believe in your case it comes not from maliciousness but from arrogance and intellectual laziness. 

First of all, I do not endeavor to “characterize” Israeli society. Israel is among the most racially diverse countries in the world. 

Secondly, my “superficial encounters” are family based and close friend based, as well as having been immersed in socialist left wing politics all of my life which is very heavily Jewish influenced – from my grandmother who was a communist and Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran to a woman in college who is also hardcore leftist and staunch zionist to attending a high school in SF which was two-thirds Jewish in which debates about Israel raged and I was smart enough to watch from a distance. 

I don’t “characterize” Israel as anything except that culturally it has forged a nationalism which is probably stronger than any other partly in the aftermath of the Holocaust and history of European pogroms, but also because even the peace activists there do not feel safe. The woman I knew was in Israel and heard the booms of the rockets as they landed in the distance, only to have her work take her to France where she had to hide from a massive anti-Semitic near-riot. 

Yes, they are a very diverse people. But they are brought together by the fact that they are broadly hated in the west as “Zionists,” “Christ killers,” and in recent decades “infidels.” In the past week, Jews and their supporters planning to demonstrate were silenced in social democratically tolerant Sweden due to threats of violence. And the Palestinian Authority, the “moderates,” approve of school curriculum materials based upon false assertions about Judaism originating with Stormfront, a Nazi website. This along with a history of Palestinian resistance sending teenage girls strapped with bombs into dance halls to kill herself and other children – and where a friend of mine inadvertently leaves a backpack on a bus leading to a bomb scare. 

I will read the article, but from the intensity of my in-law Jewish family on the subject, including my wife’s communist grandmother, and so many old friends and people I’ve worked with for so many years – many of whom oppose Israeli policies – all of them read the Hamas charter with visceral terror. All of them. [Emphasis mine]

Noam Chomsky's speaks about this:

So, for example, the electoral program of Israel’s governing party, Likud, states explicitly that there can never be a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. And they not only state it in their charter, that’s a call for the destruction of Palestine, explicit call for it. And they don’t only have it in their charter, you know, their electoral program, but they implement it. That’s quite different from the Hamas charter.

The disconnect with normal, rational sanity is almost palpable. You cannot treat people like sub-human mongrel dogs, dispossess them from their rightful land and slaughter them at will for 70 years and not engender an undying hatred. Then use that hatred to justify your own existence. If ISIL is a terrorist nation now then so is Israel. They both operate from the same base.

So, if you haven't figured out what, where and who are the American Gaza, odds are it is YOU.

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[UPDATE]
Tim Martin's column in the Times-Standard this Sunday, August 24, 2014: Bullies with badges and weapons: Tim says:

"We have made a serious mistake by militarizing our police force. They have become bullies with automatic weapons who feel it's their duty to stifle public dissent, arrest members of the press, and threaten citizens." 

"Threaten citizens" with brutal beatings and summary death.
What people in their right mind would vote for that?

American police in whatever configuration equals de facto, violence incarnate. Welcome to the American Gaza, Tim. How do you like being a Palestinian? Do you feel the hate?

--Joe