fred on israel, the empire and gaza. he always has things to say and does it well;

Guest Post by Fred Reed

‘Nuther day, ‘nuther few morgue loads in Gaza. It has become almost boring, 25,000 dead and counting. Should we go for a record?

But questions do arise to reinvigorate flagging interest. What kind of human will intentionally bomb a hospital? Or a refugee camp? Is there nothing so foul that an Israeli pilot will not do it? What could be more cowardly? What would it take to get you, the reader, to bomb a hospital’

Of course it is not the scale of what Israel is doing, but the dogged, unrelenting coldbloodedness of it, its shamelessness. It would never occur to a military man, Israeli or otherwise, to say, “No, I won’t do that.” In my decades of covering the armed forces I found officers often to be long on physical courage but almost always to lack moral courage. Soldiers pride themselves on following orders and if the orders are to bomb a refugee camp, well, the pilot was just following orders. This is what Eichmann said, though he wasn’t a soldier. The cult of obedience removes all moral responsibility.

Note that Washington is as culpable as Israel for the slaughter in Gaza. Israel depends utterly for its survival on American support. If Washington told the Israelis to stand on their heads buck naked and sing Yankee Doodle in three-part harmony, or lose all American support, in two minutes they would be upside down and wailing. The killing continues because Washington wants it to continue.

The historically literate will note that the mass deliberate bombing of civilians is not particularly Israeli, but an invention largely made and certainly perfected by the United States. The British-American air war against Germany targeted civilians. Everyone knows about the firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden, and for that matter Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though countless other German cities were so targeted, with Tokyo being firebombed to burn thousands to death. Germans who lived through this tell of exactly the results seen in Gaza, rubble, fire, dead and dying children. Plus ca change, plus ca doesn’t............more..........