As the crushing of Gaza’s civilian population continues, our historic racism peeks out at us once again with depressing clarity. Innocent civilians living in Sderot have the right to live in peace, goes the refrain, but innocent civilians living in Khan Younis do not—in fact, their deaths are their own fault.
Pardon me if I’m dense, but I just don’t see the difference between slaughtering Palestinian children in a schoolyard and slaughtering Israeli children in a pizza parlor. All the lame excuses about ‘targeting’ are pretty unconvincing. One side puts a bomb under a bus; the other puts them on a rooftop. This is supposed to matter?
Maybe Americans are more comfortable with the latter because it’s been our war-making style for decades from Vietnam through Iraq. So we can see the unashamed racism in Hamas’ rhetoric celebrating the deaths of Israeli civilians while failing to see that Mayor Bloomberg applauding the carnage during his campaign tour there is its full-on moral equivalent, just a tad better disguised. What a sad, pathetic spectacle just as we are about to pat ourselves on the back in two weeks for abolishing Jim Crow.
[Update] Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur, reports that 50 percent of Gazan children under 12 have been found to have no will to live. Whose fault is that? Their parents’?
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