Mentally debilitated zombies can’t fight back, can they?
The article Only Liars And Manipulators Say Gaza Isn’t Starving by Caitlin Johnstone (Substack) makes what I consider to be a logical error in argument in the following passage,
“When a nation keeps having to publish denials that it is intentionally starving civilians, you can safely assume it’s because that nation is intentionally starving civilians. If you saw someone on social media loudly denying the latest allegations that they are a child molester over and over again for two years, you probably wouldn’t let them babysit your kids.”
Yeah, you probably wouldn’t but would it be fair to do so? Let’s ask Kevin Spacey, who despite complete and total exoneration, will probably suffer from accusations, jokes, libel, and slander for the rest of his life. The section on his Sexual-misconduct allegations is two short paragraphs that end with “not liable” and “acquitted”, although no-one will ever care that this happened because he is now fixed in people’s heads as a child-molester who can be the butt of cheap-ass comedians’ jokes until the end of time.
What I’m saying is, is that what you’ve posited is a bullshit argument, Caitlin. It’s one of the first where I’ve seen her let her emotions carry her from a logical argument, actually.
An accusation is not a fact, no matter how many times it’s repeated. What matters is evidence. The difference between theory and fact is credible evidence.
For example, the genocide in Xinjiang suffers from a major deficit of proof. There are some blurry satellite photos that purport to show what their publishers claim are concentration camps. They might as well be pointing out pareidolia in the surface of the moon.
In the case of Gaza, we don’t have to guess. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence of starvation, including proud and loud-throated declarations of intent by the perpetrators, who only switch to loud-throated denials when it is politically expedient for them to do so.
“You don’t see pro-China spinmeisters frantically churning out propaganda denying that China is intentionally starving civilians, because China is not intentionally starving civilians.”
Yes you do! Like, China has had to deny a genocide in Xinjiang for over a decade because the west will not shut up about it, will not stop accusing it, although the evidentiary basis is so thin as to be nonexistent.
In the case of China, we are seeing a heavy-handed integration of disparate cultural groups into a dominant culture. This happens everywhere. It’s not great but it is efficient. The U.S. is filled with monolingual citizens who refuse to learn a single word of Spanish and yell at everyone they can to “learn English!” This is also cultural annihilation, is it not?
But let’s not get into the philosophical weeds here, though. Suffice it to say that Caitlin’s argument here is specious and wrong but I forgive her the exaggeration. The photos and documentation in ’Starvation Is Everywhere’: Virtual Tours of Gaza Clinics Expose the Scale of the Horror by Yarden Michaeli and Nir Hasson (Haaretz) is very detailed and would be quite harrowing to someone with a sensitive heart and who’d perhaps not already been hardened by having seen this all before so many times.
Here are some examples from the Haaretz article, which you can skip if you can’t stomach descriptions of bodies in an advanced stage of starvation.
“For this article we conducted four such tours, in different places, and conducted separate conversations with another 12 doctors, 10 of them volunteers from the United States and Britain, who are currently in the Gaza Strip or were there recently. What we saw there left no room for doubt about the scale of the horror.”
“We saw children whose bodies were blighted by hunger, with bones jutting out. Their hair had turned yellow or fallen out, their faces were wrinkled and their abdomens bloated. Their bodies were limp; many had marks on their skin. Some looked totally apathetic.”
““The starvation is everywhere – it’s everyone,” says Dr. Travis Melin, an anesthesiologist from the United States who is currently working as a volunteer in Nasser Hospital. “When I put someone to sleep for surgery this is very apparent as they are naked and asleep. It is easy to count ribs from across the room, you can see a clear pelvic bone, peripheral blood vessels are very visible as is the small amount of muscle left, as there is no longer fat obscuring these structures. I was in Gaza also a year ago, and all the people I met now were dramatically thinner, almost unrecognizable. We are now very late in this process.””
“It’s impossible to recover from five months of a shortage of food at that age. Children who undergo a thing like that – their brain is finished. Even those who survive will suffer from severe retardation.”
This particular detail—that severe malnutrition or starvation during childhood development leads to retardation —is one that I have mentioned to people throughout the last two years. The goal of the deliberate starvation isn’t necessarily to actually starve everyone to death—though they’ll take it if they can get it!—but to cripple the next generation so that we don’t have to hear silly things like “there are so many Palestinian professors and doctors and engineers” anymore. Israel is trying to get Palestinians out of there. Starving them encourages them to move.
The future of GazaIf they don’t move, then making the entire next generation retarded is also a good fallback. They simply don’t care about those people as people. Their only concern is the logistics of moving that large amount of flesh out of Gaza. Dead bodies must be burned or buried. Healthy bodies take up more space—and they might fight back. Starved bodies? Much more compact. A bunch of retarded zombies? Still annoying but at least not that dangerous anymore.
For those of us who follow the topic, this is not news. It is documentation of the completely predictable end-game of what has been meticulously planned for decades and executed over the last two years. This documentation is vital but it is not surprising. Israel—and its allies—does not consider Palestinians to be humans. They are to be exterminated like prairie dogs who eat crops. People in the Israeli government probably read this Haaretz article with no small amount of joy because it confirms for them that their plan is working and that it is nearly complete.
The article documents the intent,
““The decision we made tonight on the total cessation of the entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza is an important step,” Smotrich declared at the time. “Now we need to open the gates of hell on the enemy.”
“The gates of hell were indeed opened, and the price was paid, and is continuing to be paid, by the children of Gaza. As early as April, the UN’s food program announced that the last bakery in Gaza had shut down because it had no more flour or cooking gas. Official Israel was not fazed.”
The anti-Muslim sentiment that has been clearly prevalent for my entire lifetime (over five decades), and which rose to such heights after 9/11, is back with a vengeance. These beady-eyed and small-minded criminals never forget their goals. They want domination. And they want only their own kind. Their understanding of the world is limited to this. They know nothing of long-term solutions. They know nothing of morality. They know nothing but thinking in terms of zero-sum economies and the subsequent annihilation of the other.
Israel is probably hoping for a Punktlandung on October 7th so that it can celebrate the beginning of construction of a seaside resort with Netanyahu posing with his foot on a golden shovel, breaking ground into rubble.
Coincidentally, as I was reading this article, I was helping my family set up a big party (a baby shower), at which over 90 people would be in attendance. It’s a giant party for a single as-yet unborn baby with ungodly amounts of food. There was so much food that, even with 10 extra guests that brought the grand total to a neat 100 people, much of it wasn’t even eaten. Afterward, we were sitting in the kitchen, in the aftermath, looking at panfuls of macaroni&cheese, potato salad, meatballs, and more, wondering what we can freeze, what we can donate to friends, family, and neighbors (no-one really took anything home from the party), or, as I suggested, whether there’s a soup kitchen that could use some food.
The irony is hopefully painfully clear.