THE PICTURE ON THE RADIO

I have 3 daughters. All 3 are now successful, amazing adults. The oldest was almost 7 when the youngest was born. My middle daughter was almost 6 then. I listen to the radio for my news because I find myself getting too emotional when I watch most news on television. Sometimes, however, the reporter on the radio paints so vivid and disturbing a picture with mere, momentarily unambiguous words that those words conjure up is more vivid than any photograph or film from the greatest of masters. No masterpiece by Diane Arbus, Robert Caps or W. Eugene Smith could be any clearer.

Where I live the day was sunny, a harbinger of early spring. Perhaps it was also like that where the father the reporter described sat. This father sat wailing on the littered ground near a hospital. He cradled in his arms 2 children, a boy of 7 years and a girl of 2. He kept trying to open his daughter's eyes in vain insistence that she remain alive. This toddler was as dead as her older brother. 

According to the war criminal, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his genocidal government, this father and his dead babies are Hamas. According to the murderous scum who currently govern the nation of Israel this father trying to reanimate his dead daughter with some impossible magic from his tears is a terrorist.

No such horror ever befell me or my daughters but once my youngest nearly died because she'd caught a flu. I woke one Saturday morning late when she was just 9 months old  because she hadn't cried for a diaper change and feeding. For a week she hadn't been able to keep anything down, not Jello water, not Coke syrup, not even Emetrol. Now she was a listless ragdoll, eyes open in a motionless body. I got her to, first, a pediatrician and then to a hospital where an IV line ending in syringe larger than her delicate arm pushed fluid and life back into her. 

I was too enfolded in frantic efforts to save my daughter to fall to falling tears. I don't remember whether I spent that night in the hospital with her or just many of the other nights during her stay but I did stay by her crib about half the nights of her stay. She is now a nurse practitioner who works in hospital Emergency Rooms. She has 3 daughters of her own. My experience is in no way commensurate with that of the father in Gaza wailing over his 2 dead children after Netanyahu's resumption of his genocide in Gaza. Still the fear and distress I felt 45 years ago came streaming back to me as I heard of this poor father on March 18th. 

I can also honestly state that we're I cradling my children murdered by a war criminal more concerned with retaining his political power than in pretending to understand the least mote of human decency, I would be a terrorist from that moment on. I would find no space in my heart for any Israeli father or mother and his or her children. The next time a terrorist act by some Palestinian parent unconscionably murders some Israeli children don't place the blame on the Palestinians but rather lay those  children's bodies on Benjamin Netanyahu's doorstep. 

For each grieving parent of Palestine should there not be a matching, grieving parent in Israel? Should there not be a tear-filled Israeli eye for each tear-blinded Palestinian eye until, as Mahatma Ghandi observed, the whole world is blind?

It should be obvious to anyone with even a small amount of human decency and commitment to logic that to stop the murders the murders must stop. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have sufficient food and water and medical care and supplies. People on both sides of the Gaza border must have the right and ability to govern themselves in a way that is responsible to themselves and to their neighbors. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be subjected to some lunatic's pipedream of a casino infested beachfront resort unless it is their own will to do so. People on neither side of the Gaza border should be required to bow down before the statue of some golden calf, especially if the statue is of a golden bullshitter.

The Netanyahu government and Bibi himself are terrorists just as surely as were those Palestinians who attacked on October 7, 2023. Eliminating the murderers of Hamas is a useful goal as long as the murders of the current Israeli government are eliminated too by shipping them to the International Criminal Court and letting them rot in prison cells. Maybe Netanyahu and his equally criminal right-wing cronies could be forced to share cells with murderous Hamas criminals so they could express their blind hatred against one another while decent Israeli and Palestinians work out how to peacefully share the land of their father, Abraham.

Finally, I want to make one other point clear:

Peacefully demonstrating opposition to any government is NOT terrorism.

If you pass through a park, quadrangle, hall or room in which someone you don't like is advocating something you dislike you and only you are responsible for your feelings. Unless those you oppose accost you in some way you have not been harmed. Seeing something or someone from a distance and disliking it is nothing to you so long as you can leave the place and no longer see it. If you are free to leave or just turn your head and not see it and you claim this item is assault, it's you who need counseling and potential removal from society rather than someone else.

If someone shouts, "From the river to the sea!" from across a college campus in your direction that might be anti-Semitism but it's not any kind of assault until and unless that someone is shouting again when you are both toe to toe and nose to nose. Unfortunately, in the United States of 2025 shouting, "Support Ukraine" could get you deported regardless of your citizenship status or your distance from some neo-fascist either home grown or from South Africa.

But, as usual, I digress.

Neither Gaza nor Israel nor the world need another grieving father holding his dead children. The clear way to stop more such horror is to stop the murdering of civilians. The clear way to stop the genocide in Gaza is to remove Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet of fascist fanatics from government. By elections would benefit everyone but removal is the imperative and I'm open to suggestions as long as the remover isn't Palestinian.

DRONING ON

    Chef José Andrés' World Central Kitchen (WCK) has been lauded over most of the civilized world for feeding the hungry in disaster and war zones. Chef Andrés is fulfilling, whether intentionally or not, one of the essential aspects of human decency, a Beatitude perhaps, voiced by some itinerant preacher in the Middle East a long time ago when he said, "...for I was hungry and you gave me food...and for as much as you have done this unto the least of these, my bretheren, you have done it unto me." 

    I think that guy meant that the simple human decency of sharing food with the hungry transcends all the pettiness of this world and shows some exceptional greatness. But that's just my opinion and what do I know? I'm just an over-educated old man and an atheist too. Maybe that itinerant preacher just meant "Screw the hungry, feed me!" Regardless, Chef Andrés deserves some serious plaudits for the charity he has organized.

    The other day, some of Chef Andrés' employees and their guide and translator were in a convoy amid the war in Gaza. Surrounded by gratuitous death and destruction these 7 World Central Kitchen workers were going about the business of saving some civilians from starvation. The convoy was moving at night along a route specifically arranged with and agreed upon by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). The cars in which they were riding were clearly marked as World Central Kitchen vehicles on their roofs to make any air units of the IDF aware that the vehicles carried neutral, non-combatant aid workers.

    As this aid convoy made its way along this allegedly safe and pre-cleared route one or more IDF drones appeared overhead. These drones were equipped with U. S. provided Hellfire Missiles. They also were equipped with cameras specifically used for targeting, cameras which sent their images back to some one or more IDF pilots controlling the drones from a chair some safe distance away. Because cameras need to see in the dark, these drones had either conventional lights or night-vision sensors or infra-red sensors on board to give their controllers specific information about the vehicles and their passengers.

    Before we go further, let me make clear, the person or persons controlling the drone or drones above the WCK convoy could see the vehicles blow those drones.

    What happened next has been clearly attested to and explained. A drone fired a Hellfire Missile at 1 of the convoy vehicles. The survivors of that missile strike got out of the wreck and ran to the the next vehicle. When they arrived at that next vehicle another Hellfire Missile hit that vehicle. The survivors of the 2 Hellfire Missile strikes then ran to the third vehicle in the convoy. When they reached that third vehicle a third Hellfire Missile destroyed this new vehicle finally killing the rest of the 7 WCK employees who had survived the previous 2 missile strikes.

    The IDF and the Israeli Government have brushed this horror off as a terrible mistake. Let me ask you, is that denial of responsibility credible? Is there any iota of truth in that denial?

    Remember that the convoy was on a prescribed route pre-cleared by the IDF. Remember that the vehicles were clearly marked specifically so that they could be identified from the air. Now remember that aid workers who survived the first missile strike weren't targeted until they reached the second vehicle and again weren't targeted until they reached the third vehicle in the convoy. Finally, I would ask you how utterly full of shit are the IDF and the Israeli Government? How clearly, I ask you, is it that those WCK workers were targeted over and over again. 

    Two ships laden with food for those starving in the Gaza Strip turned back to Cyprus and WCK withdrew from Gaza following the murders of their fellows thus insuring that more Palestinians would die of starvation, a horrible, lingering death that takes children first. How, I must ask you, can the malignant, meretricious and mendacious IDF and Israeli Government of Benjamin Netanyahu retain any scintilla of credibility. And finally, I ask you to look up or call to memory the piles of emaciated corpses in the Nazi death camps, the skeletal survivors in the Nazi death camps, the destruction of Lidice and Ležáky and the Warsaw Ghetto and then I ask you how can the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those who suffered those horrors can consent to visiting the same horrors on any of their fellow human beings?

    All Palestinians are not Hamas. I would suggest that even as honorable and decent Jews (I am excepting Stephen Miller who is Jewish but otherwise neither.) oppose the Netanyahu Government, so are there Palestinians who oppose Hamas. Just as there are Hamas fighters who dehumanized Jews to commit the atrocities of October 7, 2023 so there are some Israelis, the drone operators in this WCK case for example, are no better than the vilest of Nazi SS officers, non-coms and camp guards. I have spoken with and respected survivors of the Nazi death camps. I have known men who liberated the Buchenwald Camp, one of those being one of my uncles. I find it incomprehensible that Israelis have dehumanized Palestinians as the Nazis did the Jews. I find it incomprehensible that Israelis, no matter how threatened they may feel, would sink so low as to dishonor the the 6,000,000 murdered in the Shoah by becoming like their murderers.

    I do find those things incomprehensible yet there is plenty of room left to rend my heart that my country, my government, my president is willfully complicit in the on-going Palestinian genocide and in the wanton murder of the 7 workers of the World Central Kitchen.