| "Ongoing Palestinian Genocide" | | Print | |
| Editorial | ||||
| By Gideon Polya March 6, 2008 On the Web at: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/20745&Itemid=1 | ||||
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Israel-US & Nazi death ratios compared The World continues to look on with horror as apartheid Israel continues to police its Gaza Concentration Camp with tanks, shells, bombs and rockets. According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for 4.2 million UN-registered Palestinian refugees in the Middle East, 254 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military so far in 2008 as compared to 301 last year. Last week alone 123 Palestinians, 27 of them children and 28 of them unarmed civilians, died in Israeli attacks. 5 Israelis were killed in the same period, four in Palestinian-killing military operations in Gaza and one by a rocket that landed in Israel (and which, together with hundreds of home-made rocket attacks, precipitated the latest horrendous Israeli violence) (see: CapeTimes, March 5, 2008). How do civilized, anti-racist humanitarians respond LINGUISTICALLY to such utterly disproportionate, misplaced and deadly violence? It is perhaps most useful and surely most evidently “unbiased” in relation to Zionist Jewish Israelis to see the views of outstanding, anti-racist, humanitarian Jewish scholars - noting that the primary messages from the Jewish Holocaust (6 million dead) and of the World War 2 Holocaust as a whole (30 million Slavs, Jews and Roma dead) are “zero tolerance for racism” and “never again to anyone”. Thus outstanding Jewish Israeli scholar Dr Ilan Pappe has described what is happening in 2008 as a “Gaza Genocide” and a “West Bank ethnic cleansing” (see: here). Outstanding Jewish American linguistics scholar Professor Noam Chomsky of MIT describes the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) as a highly abusive “Prison” – noting that half of the 4 million inmates are Children. Others use the term “Concentration Camp”, noting that we have to go back to the Nazi era, post-war US atrocities in Asia and Apartheid atrocities in South Africa to see routine, violent, deadly, military policing of Indigenous People in Concentration Camps. Indeed outstanding Jewish South African Ronnie Kasrils - leader in the fight against Apartheid and now a South African Government Minister – has described Apartheid Israel rule over the Holy Land thus: “Israel 2007: worse than Apartheid”. What do Palestinians scholars think? The situation has been recently described as described as a Palestinian Holocaust by Palestinian scholar Dr Elias Akleh, exiled from his homeland and now living in the US (see: here ). It has been frequently described by others as a Palestinian Genocide, a term that is amply justified in relation to the definitions of the UN Genocide Convention as outlined below. _________________________________________ Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. _________________________________________ “Intent to destroy in whole or in part" - sustained (and frequently asserted) intent over about 150 years of the Zionist colonial project; 0.75 million Palestinian refugees in 1948; currently 7 million Palestinian refugees, and 4.2 million Palestinian refugees registered with the UN in the Middle East; over 40 years of illegal Israeli Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza; post-1967 excess deaths 0.3 million; post-1967 under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million; 2,400 under-5 year old Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) infants die avoidably EACH YEAR in the OPT "Prison" due to Apartheid Israeli war crimes. a) Killing - about 50,000 Palestinians killed since 1948; post-1967 excess deaths 0.3 million; post-1967 under-5 infant deaths 0.2 million; 2,400 under-5 year old Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT) infants die avoidably EACH YEAR in the OPT "Prison" due to Israeli ignoring of the Geneva Convention; 254 OPT Palestinians killed by the Israeli military in the LAST 2 MONTHS OF 2008 ALONE, 301 killed thus last year (latest UNRWA data; see above). b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm - see (a) and the shocking UNICEF reports of the appalling conditions psychologically scarring OPT children . c) Conditions to cause destruction in whole or in part - see (a) and (b); Professor Noam Chomsky describes the OPT as a highly abusive "Prison"; others use the valid term "Concentration Camp" and make parallels with the Warsaw Ghetto; one has to turn to US-guarded Vietnamese hamlets and the Nazi era atrocities to see routine, horrendously violent and deadly military policing of civilian concentration camps. d) Measures intended to prevent births - see (a), (b), and (c) above; dozens of pregnant women dying at road blocks; other killing of pregnant Palestinian women; huge infant mortality in the OPT with the Occupier in gross violation of the Geneva Convention. e) Forcible transferring of children – irreversible transferring by killing of children - 0.2 million post-invasion infant deaths; 27 OPT children violently killed in the last week alone, mass imprisonment of 2 million OPT children; hundreds of Palestinian children in abusive Israeli high-security prisons in Israel; forcible separation of families by racist Israeli Apartheid Laws, marriage laws and immigration laws. As indicated above we have to turn to the Nazi crimes of WW2 and post-war US war crimes in its post-1950 Asian Wars for baseline comparisons for horrendous maltreatment and mass murder of conquered Indigenous civilians. It is accordingly instructive to look at quantitative “us and them” "death ratios" in these other conflicts e.g. in the Ardeatine Caves Massacre in Italy in 1944 it became 10 to 1 after Hitler ordered execution of 10 Italian civilians for every German soldier killed in a prior Partisan bombing. In World War 2 the Axis civilian deaths totalled 5.1 million as compared to Allied civilian losses in Europe and Asia totalling 54 million; US, British Empire, Axis and Soviet military losses totalled 0.29 million, 0.45 million, 5.9 million and 13.6 million, respectively. Accordingly, the "enemy civilian"/"military death" "kill ratios" were 0.4 (for the Soviet forces), 9.2 (Axis), 11.3 (the British Empire) and 17.6 (the US) . The following "enemy civilian avoidable mortality"/"US combat death" "kill ratios" have been calculated for the Korean War (1950-1953) (23.8), the Indo-China War (1957-1975) (276.5), the Gulf War & Sanctions War (1990-2003) (12,259), the Afghanistan War (2001-2005) (15,716) and the Iraq War (2003-2005) (323.9) (see MWC News) .
The “death ratio” in Gaza in the last week (123 Palestinians killed by the Israelis in response to 1 Israeli killed by a rocket) is over 12 (TWELVE) times that advocated by arch-fiend Adolph Hitler but consonant with the war criminal, civilian-targeting, US post-war military technology and strategy used by the US and its allies - notably the UK, Australia, Canada, NATO and Israel - in post-1950 Asian wars against Indigenous Asians (excess Indigenous Asian deaths in post-1950 US Asian Wars now total 24 million). The primary messages from the Jewish Holocaust (6 million dead) and of the World War 2 Holocaust as a whole (30 million Slavs, Jews and Roma dead) are “zero tolerance for racism” and “never again to anyone” - those responsible for the Palestinian Holocaust and Palestinian Genocide are thus grossly violating the memory of the martyred 6 million, and grossly violating the fundamental moral messages of the World War 2 Holocaust. Indeed the Palestinian Holocaust (post-invasion excess deaths of 0.3 million out of an average 1967-2008 population of 2.6 million) makes shocking comparison with the Jewish Holocaust in Hungary in 1944-1945 (0.2 million Jewish deaths out of a Hungarian Jewish population of 0.7 million). What can decent people do? Silence kills and silence is complicity – we cannot walk by on the other side. As I have put it in a recent article in MWC News, “We are all Palestinian” . We are obliged to (a) inform everyone we can and (b) to act ethically by collective and individual, intra-national and international Sanctions and Boycotts as citizens, voters and consumers in all our avoidable dealings with Racist Zionists, Apartheid Israel and all those countries, corporations and individuals complicit in the Palestinian Holocaust.
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Dr Gideon Polya, MWC News Chief political editor, published some 130 works in a 4 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text "Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds" (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London, 2003), and is currently writing a book on global mortality ---________________________________________
