Look at Israel’s role

Oh, if only the slaughter in Gaza were as simplistically black-and-white as Melanie Sturm’s “Think Again” editorial on Thursday (“Confronting evil in Gaza — if not now, when?” Commentary, The Aspen Times). The reality is Gaza has turned from the world’s biggest concentration camp into the world’s biggest graveyard. For many, the only source of information is what they see on their TV screens. The footage of headless toddlers has therefore become the direct message that Palestinians want to use to convey: “This is our daily reality!” Yet mainstream media have systematically sanitized the images coming out of Gaza to present a more “acceptable” picture of violence.

Just hours after the White House condemned the shelling of a U.N. school in Gaza, the Pentagon confirmed it was providing Israel with fresh supplies of ammunition, including mortar rounds for tanks and ammunition for grenade launchers. (Just a side note if your curiosity is piqued enough about whose tax dollars are paying for the slaughter.)

To echo Noam Chomsky, “How can the international media — read Western — be objective when they are controlled by five transnational corporations, all of which have intimate relationships with the U.S. defense industry?” Are the more than 200 children killed in Gaza only “regrettable” collateral damage?

Quoting Rashid Khalid in the New Yorker: “What Israel is doing in Gaza is collective punishment for Gaza’s refusal to be a docile ghetto. And the truth of ghettos — what happens when you imprison 1.8 million people in an area the third of NYC with no control of borders and almost no access to the sea for fishermen, no real way in or out, with drones buzzing overhead day and night — is that eventually the ghetto will fight back. It was true in Soweto and Belfast and it is true in Gaza.”

A life sentence imposed by Israel for each gentle soul misplaced inside that jail.

Michael Levengood

Carbondale