Has the Israeli government gone collectively insane? Can anyone put an end to the carnage?
Over 33,000 Palestinians, including more than 14,000 children, brutality slaughtered since October. Who knows how many are still buried under the rubble? The official figure is estimated to be over 40,000.
Thousands more have been maimed for life – children are being forced to have limbs amputated without any anesthetic – just stop for a moment to think about how painful and traumatic that would be. Think about looking at your child as they scream in agony as the surgeon saws off their leg with no pain relief..
In the past 24 hours alone the Israeli military has committed a barbaric massacre at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza where hundreds of civilians, including doctors, nurses, and patients!! were killed. It has fired missiles into a residential area of Damascus, Syria, killing foreign diplomatic staff and it has fired 3 missiles targetting the clearly marked convoy of an international aid organisation killing the passengers – their crime? Being aid workers trying to feed the starving population.
By any measure the Israeli government has gone insane and is acting not recklessly but as if there are no repercussions, no consequences and no one to stop them.
Despite many of the aid workers killed being British, Rishi Sunak refuses to condemn the ongoing genocide and in fact is happy to continue supplying the Israeli military with more weapons. This despite the government receiving legal advice that Israel is in breach of international humanitarian law. This should have put an immediate halt to arms exports to Tel Aviv.
The pathetic and supine Kier Starmer is, as usual, offering no opposition. Earlier he said Israel had the right to deprive Palestinian civilians of food, water and electricity. The man has the morals of a paving stone.
We are ruled by absolute fucking monsters!!
If you’re still silent on the slaughter then you’re lost.
In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Harold Pinter quoted the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda…
Here is an extract from a poem by Pablo Neruda, ‘I’m Explaining a Few Things’:
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate.
Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives.
Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain:
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.
And you will ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land.
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!*
He said “I quote Neruda because nowhere in contemporary poetry have I read such a powerful visceral description of the bombing of civilians.”
To conclude his speech, Pinter warned:
“I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.
If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us – the dignity of man.”
Mike Raddie is co-editor of BSNEWS.
