EDWARD CURTIN • NOVEMBER 10, 2023
As you know, I have supported your bid for the presidency even before you declared last spring. I have admired and believed in you for years, and when you entered the race I felt hope for the first time in decades that your non-violent impulses, honed by your tragic family history and a deep revulsion for our country’s imperial wars and violent history, would triumph and usher in a new era of peace. Despite the naysayers who dismissed you from the start, I said Yes, that you would shock those who ridiculed and maligned you and that you would be the man to carry out President Kennedy’s American University speech and fulfill his and your father’s legacy of “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women” because “we all breathe the same air” and “we all cherish our children’s futures” and “we are all mortal.”
I suggested that you would heal the divide and not expand it. Seeing you stumble on your way by throwing your full support to the Zionist leaders of Israel has been a body blow to me. At first I thought it might be explained by your reaction to the false antisemitic accusations that were hurled your way once word emerged that you might enter the presidential race. But as time went on it dawned on me that I was wrong and that you were in sync with the powerful Israel Lobby. So now, I feel as if we are in the tenth round of fight for your soul’s compassion. That you have not defended the children of Gaza and condemned their massacre by the thousands has shocked and sickened me.
As a scholar of religion and its intersection with politics, I have been meditating on current events.
Religion has for a very long time been used as a cover for slaughtering people and seizing their land. This is true for the United States and Israel. It is built into their theological underpinnings. So it should not be at all surprising that the current Israeli massacre of Palestinians is fully supported by the U.S. government led by President Joseph Biden and by almost every presidential aspirant. You, however, as a self-styled anti-war candidate are a great surprise to me, although I may be naïve and shouldn’t be since you gave your unequivocal support to the Israel government a month ago, following the October 7 Hamas-led incursion into Israel that killed innocent Israelis (many of whom were also probably killed by the IDF as Jonathan Cooke has reported). Despite that, I still expected your conscience would surely prompt you to condemn what can only be described as genocide, the slaughter of the innocents in Gaza that is ongoing.
You have undermined your claim to “end the forever wars” and to defend children. Why you have done (or not done) this is a question that so many of your supporters and former supporters are asking. Only you can say. Perhaps we might only know if you unequivocally condemned Israel’s actions and faced whatever might come your way as a result. This is unlikely, I now realize, but one can still hope. I think it would take a spiritual miracle of moral courage, because of your claim that your historical analysis that you say is sincere and true that Israel now and always has been the just and innocent party and the Palestinians the evil ones. I find your analysis unbelievable and your silence as innocents are being slaughtered indefensible, even as I applaud so many of your other positions, as you know. Everyone knows that running for the U.S. presidency creates strange bedfellows, but your touting of the Israeli propaganda in which you conflate the Palestinian people with Hamas to justify massacring civilians is beyond strange – it is immoral.
I know how much you respect Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and you no doubt have heard his words before.
“And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.
Conscience calls to you, Bobby. Be true to that voice within. Politic as it may be, there is a heavy burden of guilt for abandoning the Palestinians to slaughter by silence. King learned this when he saw those photos of the napalmed and dead Vietnamese children and was conscience-stricken to come to Riverside Church in New York to give his speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence.” You can do the same. The pictures of dead Palestinian children, victims of U.S. support for Israeli bombs, are there to see. Martin quoted your uncle, John, that “those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” He said that we can no longer worship the God of hate and retribution. He said, “Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.”
You too, Bobby, can break your silence, step up high and let your conscience also leave you no other choice but to condemn the genocide in Gaza. As Martin said, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.”
You say you are making “a moral case for Israel” as the justified party in its seventy-five year long war with the Palestinians. In doing so you have reneged on your campaign promise to emulate President John Kennedy, who would be appalled by your silence. Your website, Kennedy 24, declares that “[you] Kennedy will revive a lost thread of American foreign policy thinking, the one championed by his uncle, John F. Kennedy who, over his 1000 days in office, had become a firm anti-imperialist.” In genuflecting to the Israel genocide while touting your connection to JFK and your father, Senator Robert Kennedy, you have in fact taken a position toward Israel diametrically opposed to theirs. One could sense this coming when under pressure this past summer, you withdrew your support for Roger Waters, a strong Palestinian supporter who was falsely accused of being anti-Jewish, and you then allowed your “friend” Rabbi Shmuley Boteach to say that Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian, killed your father in 1968 when you knew that was a lie and was part of a sophisticated intelligence conspiracy to blame the patsy who was said to hate Israel. To allow Shmuley to audaciously and heartlessly repeat a CIA trope about your father’s assassination was a telltale sign of worse to come.
For both the U.S. and Israel, the Bible has been used to cover up the crimes of their foundings. They have analogous histories rooted in religious myths. In both cases, the indigenous peoples were considered less than human – savages, infidels – or in the description of Palestinians by the current Israeli Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, “human animals.” Such racist, dehumanizing language has been repeated time and again throughout the American and Israeli narratives used to justify their crimes against those they killed and whose land they stole. The gloss of civilized hypocrisy has been unmasked by such language, just as it was when Hitler repeatedly called Jews “vermin.” Irony aside, the Nazi rhetoric of denigration and racial superiority to justify exterminating Jewish people has been repeatedly mirrored by American and Israeli leaders, whether it was against the Original Free Peoples of North America, Vietnamese, Koreans, Iraqis, etc. or the Palestinians. It is the master/slave mentality deeply rooted in U.S. and Israel history.
Bobby, you have said that you hope to be the second independent candidate to become president, the first being George Washington. Yet Washington was a racist and slave owner who supported the extermination of the Indian natives so the white settlers could take their land. He himself did so, speculating in Native lands together with most of the other prominent politicians from the early days of the Republic, including Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, Andrew Jackson, et al. For the governors and legislators of the thirteen states it was also open sesame on the seizure of Indian land which required their slaughter in turn.
One can learn this in Peter P. d’Errico’s important recent book, Federal Anti-Indian Law: The Legal Entrapment of Indigenous Peoples, where he makes clear how U.S. law was used to codify such “legal” theft and killing. Such federal law was, as d’Errico writes, a claim of unlimited U.S. power and not really law at all but the suspension of law as it granted the U.S. government complete authority over Native peoples, their lives, and their land. Legal theft, in other words. Like the English justification for their claim to their colonies – the “right of discovery” proclaimed in Henry VII’s commission to John Cabot: “to subdue and take possession of any lands unoccupied by any Christian Power” – a series of three Supreme Court rulings in the 1830s by Chief Justice John Marshall were based on the claim of “Christian discovery,” which in turn was based on a papal grant from Pope Alexander the Sixth in 1493 that gave to Christopher Columbus’s sponsors, Ferdinand and Isabella, ownership of any land Columbus might discover. This divine right required the killing and subjugation of non-Christian infidels and heathens who were considered brute animals, just as the Palestinians are today.
Similar justifications have been used by Zionists for the killing of Palestinians and the seizure of their land in the name of the Biblical Jewish God and his instructions to them. This myth claims that God gave them the ancestral Palestinians’ land, therefore, like native peoples of North America who, according to the non-law U.S. Indian law, only had the right of occupancy, the Palestinians could be killed and dispossessed by the God-given rightful owners, which they were in 1948. Netanyahu has made such claims many times, as have his predecessors. He calls for a holy war of annihilation against the Palestinians, based on the Hebrew Bible. This is widely known and has a long history in the Zionist propaganda narrative that has allowed for seventy-five years of killing and the systematic shrinking of Palestinian land to its pitiful size today.
It is interesting to note that the three primary countries that intersect in the use of religious justification for colonial and imperial policies are England, the U.S., and Israel – together with the Papacy and its May 4, 1493 bull Inter Caetera issued by Pope Alexander the Sixth to declare Christian discovery. I mention this since I am an Irish-American Catholic, and it was the Irish uprising against the English colonial occupiers that has become a key inspiration for anti-colonial rebels throughout the twentieth century and beyond. I have taken inspiration from my Irish ancestors. This is your heritage also, Bobby, so it becomes even more surprising that you, even as you tout the American Revolutionary War rebel fighters against the English colonialists, would support the Israeli genocide against the Palestinians. As a lawyer, you must be aware of Federal Indian Law and how it, like all law, is rooted in a metaphysics of being human; has presuppositions that are brought to the bar, and in the case of federal Indian law, a Christian nomos at odds with that of Native peoples’.
You surely know that the Israeli assault on Gaza is a massive war crime according to international law, and even within the moderate Catholic just war theory, is, by its distorted proportionality, evil and must be rejected as immoral and a terrible sin. You claim to want to end all wars but support the ongoing slaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians, including so many children and women. Nor have you said a word against Biden’s saber rattling with aircraft carriers, U.S. drones, and assistance for Israel’s bloodthirsty assault that raises the threat of a much wider war that could turn nuclear.
Yes, the question is why such silence, which you can break now. I beg you to speak out. You are a man of conscience. MLK, Jr. speaks to us all still.
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular – but one must take it simply because it is right.
Pax tibi,
(Republished from Edward Curtin by permission of author or representative)
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News
BBC apologises after saying IDF is ‘targeting’ doctors inside Gaza hospital
Board of Deputies attacks broadcaster for ‘staggering lack of care’ in reporting IDF operation
BY RICHARD PERCIVALNOVEMBER 15, 2023 10:27
Newsreader Monica Miller made the incorrect assumption on Wednesday morning (Photo: BBC)
The BBC has apologised after a presenter said the IDF was “targeting medical teams as well as Arab speakers” during a military operation inside Gaza’s main hospital.
The IDF began its operation against Hamas in a specific area of Al-Shifa hospital on Tuesday.
The Israeli military has already provided evidence to show that the terror group uses the hospital as a base, including footage of Hamas fighters firing shoulder-launched rockets from outside the hospital entrance.
The IDF has delivered fuel, incubators, baby food and medical supplies to the hospital ahead of and during the operation.
But the BBC appeared to misquote a report from Reuters on the operation on Wednesday morning.
Speaking on the BBC News channel shortly after midnight, newsreader Monica Miller said: “We are hearing from Reuters that is reporting that Israel says its forces are carrying out an operation against Hamas in Gaza’s Al-Shifa hospital and they are targeting people including medical teams as well as Arab speakers.
“They are also saying that Israel is calling on all Hamas operatives in the hospital to surrender at this point.”
However, the IDF had actually said: “Based on intelligence information and an operational necessity, IDF forces are carrying out a precise and targeted operation against Hamas in a specified area in the Shifa hospital.
“The IDF forces include medical teams and Arabic speakers, who have undergone specified training to prepare for this complex and sensitive environment, with the intent that no harm is caused to civilians.”
They added: “We can confirm that incubators, baby food and medical supplies brought by IDF tanks from Israel have successfully reached the Shifa hospital.
“Our medical teams and Arabic speaking soldiers are on the ground to ensure that these supplies reach those in need.”
The Board of Deputies called on the BBC to issue an apology over the remark.
In a statement, they said: “We are absolutely appalled by BBC News footage which appears to show a newsreader misquoting a Reuters report which cited the IDF saying it was taking ‘medical teams and Arabic speakers’ into Al-Shifa hospital to help patients.”
“The BBC Newsreader quoted the Reuters report as saying that the IDF was ‘targeting medical teams as well as Arab speakers’.
“At best, this shows a staggering lack of care when reporting on a highly volatile situation, which can have a knock-on effect all over the world, including in Britain, where antisemitic attacks have risen by more than 500 per cent since October 7.
“Incidents like this make a mockery of the BBC’s oft-stated dedication to professionalism and impartiality.
“The Corporation must issue a public apology without delay for this egregious misreporting.”
Hadar Sela, co-editor of CAMERA UK, told the JC: “The fact that the presenter and the rest of the production team did not question the claim that Israel was targeting medical staff and Arabic speakers speaks volumes about the ‘received wisdoms’ at play in BBC newsrooms.”
In a statement on the BBC News channel on Wednesday morning, a presenter said: “BBC News, as it covered initial reports that Israeli forces had entered Gaza’s main hospital, we said that medical teams and Arabic speakers were being targeted.
“This was incorrect and misquoted a Reuters report. We should have said IDF forces included medical teams and Arabic speakers for this operation.
“We apologise for this error which fell below our usual editorial standards. The correct version of events was broadcast minutes later.”
It comes after senior BBC executive Rhodri Talfan Davies and director of editorial policy David Jordan admitted they had made mistakes over their coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
Speaking at an event in South Hampstead last week, Davies, the corporation’s director of nations, said “there are clearly dangers and risks when we enter highly contested, highly polarised areas.”
He also stressed the BBC had put its “hands up” when it got things wrong, also acknowledging the ‘fear factor’ for the Jewish community was “significant”.
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Israel fails to show evidence of Hamas command center at al-Shifa hospital
Maureen Clare Murphy Rights and Accountability 15 November 2023
Israel raided al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City at dawn on Wednesday after encircling and besieging it for days and launching heavy attacks in the area. Troops had reportedly withdrawn from hospital buildings and redeployed to al-Shifa’s gates on Wednesday evening.
Late Wednesday night, Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the orthopedic department at al-Shifa hospital, told Al Jazeera Arabic that Israeli bulldozers began razing the area around the southern gate of the medical complex.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, hailed his military’s conquest of Gaza’s largest hospital, saying on Wednesday that “there is no place in Gaza that we cannot reach. There are no hideouts. There is no shelter or refuge for the Hamas murderers.”
But Israel’s own propaganda published in the aftermath of the raid shows that Netanyahu and the military’s longstanding accusation that Hamas uses al-Shifa to shield its command center is a deadly lie.
The Israeli military published a more than seven-minute “one-shot” video purportedly showing the discovery of “Hamas weapons” found at the hospital’s MRI center. The military’s footage showed rifle parts wrapped in fabric in a small closet and its spokesperson holding up a backpack, gesturing toward a small laptop computer and picking up a stack of CDs.
The original video was soon deleted and the military eventually published a version of the video that is around 20 seconds shorter than the first iteration, truncating its claim that the laptop showed an image of an Israeli soldier “rescued” by troops.
The military’s footage also purported to show a militant’s “grab bag” containing weapons behind an MRI machine and, just as implausibly, a bulletproof vest bearing the insignias of the military wings of both Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The alleged discovery of weapons is potentially entirely fabricated. And in the event that it is true, a few rusty rifle parts in a utility closet is hardly evidence of the hospital serving as a military command center.
Israeli propaganda
Recall that last month, Israel published an “intelligence-based” animation portraying a vast underground complex that supposedly existed beneath the hospital.
Israel has been making such allegations about al-Shifa since at least 2009.
4\ The “forensic evidence” he’s touching all over with his bare hands:
A rusty rifle
5 dust-filled rifles with no cartridges (likely for hospital guards)
A dust-filled gear
1 rifle & gear in pristine condition, but with 2 GIANT bullets for a vehicle mounted machine gun (why?) pic.twitter.com/DAJT47APzd— Muhammad Shehada (@muhammadshehad2) November 15, 2023
Mondoweiss published a clip of the supposed “one-shot” video released by the Israeli military showing that it was in fact edited:
The Israeli military also released photos of a soldier at al-Shifa standing next to stacked cardboard boxes with large sheets of paper affixed to them reading “medical supplies” and “baby food” in English – a crude attempt to spin the raid as a humanitarian operation:
One of the boxes in the Israeli propaganda photos appears to be shown in the “one-shot video” next to the bag of weapons that the military claims it found in al-Shifa – strongly suggesting that the “evidence” of contraband found at the medical facility was planted:
Israeli military propagandists also produced a video purportedly showing incubators that it offered to transfer to al-Shifa’s pediatric ward, and a photo a soldier loading incubators into a van:
Multiple neonate patients at al-Shifa have died in recent days. The babies died not because of a lack of incubators, but because they lacked oxygen after Israel cut the supply of electricity to Gaza more than a month ago. Hospitals have run out of fuel to run emergency generators due to Israel’s ban on the transfer of fuel to the territory.
0pxInternational law experts and human rights groups say that Israel’s total siege on Gaza, including the ban on electricity of fuel, is a war crime.
Israeli raid terrorizes medical staff and patients
Adnan al-Bursh, the head of the orthopedic department at al-Shifa, told Al Jazeera on Wednesday that Israeli forces had surrounded the hospital and were targeting anyone who moved. He said that staff were unable to communicate between departments.
The director of the hospital told the Qatari broadcaster that the hospital’s water supply line had exploded, saying that “we do not have a drop of water” for the hundreds of injured and thousands of displaced people present at the facility.
On Tuesday, Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesperson for the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza, said that dozens of people were buried in a mass grave on the premises of al-Shifa hospital and that many more decomposing bodies still need to be buried, but the situation was dangerous due to the presence of the Israeli military.
He said that 40 patients, including three children, had died due to a lack of medical supplies at al-Shifa.
Witnesses at al-Shifa said that during the Israeli military raid, troops had “searched its rooms and basement,” Reuters reported.
Sources at al-Shifa told Al Jazeera that Israeli soldiers ordered young men to surrender. “About 30 people were reportedly taken out into the courtyard, stripped of their clothes, blindfolded and interrogated by Israeli soldiers,” Al Jazeera reported.
“Israeli forces have also blown up a warehouse of medicine and medical devices, sources said.”
Dr. Ahmed El Mokhallalati, a surgeon at al-Shifa, described a terrifying situation for hundreds of patients, their family members, medical staff and thousands of displaced people sheltering at the hospital as heavy gunfire and explosions were heard throughout the complex.
“We don’t know what they will do to us,” El Mokhallalati said. “We don’t know whether they will kill people or terrorize them. We know all the propaganda is lies, and they know as well as we do that there is nothing at al-Shifa medical center.”
Palestinian health officials in Gaza and Hamas have vigorously denied allegations that Palestinian fighters use hospitals as command centers, with the latter urging the UN secretary-general to form an international delegation to rebuke Israel’s claims.
US spokespersons parrot Israeli accusations
On Tuesday, in the hours before Israeli forces raided al-Shifa, White House spokesperson John Kirby claimed that the US has “information” that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “use some hospitals in the Gaza Strip, including al-Shifa, and tunnels underneath them to conceal and to support their military operations and to hold hostages.”
He alleged that militants “operate a command-and-control node from al-Shifa in Gaza City. They have stored weapons there, and they’re prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against that facility.”
Kirby told reporters that the US’ information “comes from a variety of intelligence sourcing” but did not offer specific evidence.
Those claims were repeated by the Pentagon’s spokesperson on Tuesday, who even asserted that Hamas and Islamic Jihad “have weapons stored there and are prepared to respond to an Israeli military operation against the facility”:
There have however been no confirmed reports of armed resistance from inside al-Shifa and Israel did not claim to have encountered, captured or killed any fighters as it raided the facility, saying only that at least five fighters “were killed by troops during a gun battle outside the hospital.”
Kirby also said that the Biden administration does “not support striking a hospital from the air, and we do not want to see a firefight in the hospital where innocent people, helpless people, sick people are simply trying to get the medical care that they deserve.”
On Wednesday, Kirby denied accusations that the Biden administration authorized the raid on al-Shifa.
Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian chief, said that he was “appalled by reports of military raids” at al-Shifa, adding that “the protection of newborns, patients, medical staff and all civilians must override all other concerns.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director of the World Health Organization, said that the reports of a “military incursion into al-Shifa hospital are deeply concerning.” He added that the agency had been unable to contact health personnel at the hospital and “we’re extremely worried for their and their patients’ safety.”
On Tuesday, Human Rights Watch said that Israel’s repeated attacks on medical facilities, health workers and ambulances “are further destroying the Gaza Strip’s healthcare system and should be investigated as war crimes.”
The group said that “no evidence put forward would justify depriving hospitals and ambulances of their protected status under international humanitarian law.”
BIG BROTHER in the 21. Century 