Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
By Chris Hedges / Original to ScheerPost
DOHA, Qatar: I am in the studio of Al Jazeera’s Arabic service watching a live feed from Gaza City. The Al Jazeera reporter in northern Gaza, because of the intense Israeli shelling, was forced to evacuate to southern Gaza. He left his camera behind. He trained it on Al-Shifa hospital, Gaza’s largest medical complex. It is night. Israeli tanks fire directly towards the hospital compound. Long horizontal red flashes. A deliberate attack on a hospital. A deliberate war crime. A deliberate massacre of the most helpless civilians, including the very sick and infants. Then the feed goes dead.
We sit in front of the monitors. We are silent. We know what this means. No power. No water. No internet. No medical supplies. Every infant in an incubator will die. Every dialysis patient will die. Everyone in the intensive care unit will die. Everyone who needs oxygen will die. Everyone who needs emergency surgery will die. And what will happen to the 50,000 people who, driven from their homes by the relentless bombing, have taken refuge on the hospital grounds? We know the answer to that as well. Many of them, too, will die.
There are no words to express what we are witnessing. In the five weeks of horror this is one of the pinnacles of horror. The indifference of Europe is bad enough. The active complicity by the United States is unfathomable. Nothing justifies this. Nothing. And Joe Biden will go down in history as an accomplice to genocide. May the ghosts of the thousands of children he has participated in murdering haunt him for the rest of his life.
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Israel and the United States are sending a chilling message to the rest of the world. International and humanitarian law, including the Geneva Convention, are meaningless pieces of paper. They did not apply in Iraq. They do not apply in Gaza. We will pulverize your neighborhoods and cities with bombs and missiles. We will wantonly murder your women, children, elderly and sick. We will set up blockades to engineer starvation and the spread of infectious diseases. You, the “lesser breeds” of the earth, do not matter. To us you are vermin to be extinguished. We have everything. If you try and take any of it away from us, we will kill you. And we will never be held accountable.
We are not hated for our values. We are hated because we have no values. We are hated because rules only apply to others. Not to us. We are hated because we have arrogated to ourselves the right to carry out indiscriminate slaughter. We are hated because we are heartless and cruel. We are hated because we are hypocrites, talking about protecting civilians, the rule of law and humanitarianism while extinguishing the lives of hundreds of people in Gaza a day, including 160 children.
Israel reacted with indignation and moral outrage when it was accused of bombing the al-Ahli Arab Christian hospital in Gaza, which left hundreds of dead. The bombing, Israel claimed, came from an errant rocket fired by Palestine Islamic Jihad. There is nothing in the arsenal of Hamas or Islamic Jihad that could have replicated the massive explosive power of the missile that struck the hospital. Those of us who have covered Gaza have heard this Israel trope so many times it is risible. They always blame Hamas and the Palestinians for their war crimes, now attempting to argue that hospitals are Hamas command centers and therefore legitimate targets. They never provide evidence. The Israeli military and government lie like they breathe.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), which has staff working in Al-Shifa, issued a statement saying patients, doctors and nurses are “trapped in hospitals under fire.” It called on the “Israeli government to cease this unrelenting assault on Gaza’s health system.”
“Over the past 24 hours, hospitals in Gaza have been under relentless bombardment. Al-Shifa hospital complex, the biggest health facility where MSF staff are still working, has been hit several times, including the maternity and outpatient departments, resulting in multiple deaths and injuries,” the statement read. “The hostilities around the hospital have not stopped. MSF teams and hundreds of patients are still inside Al-Shifa hospital. MSF urgently reiterates its calls to stop the attacks against hospitals, for an immediate ceasefire and for the protection of medical facilities, medical staff and patients.”
Three other hospitals in northern Gaza and Gaza City are encircled by Israeli forces and tanks, in what a doctor told Al Jazeera was a “day of war against hospitals.” The Indonesian Hospital has reportedly also lost power. The U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reports that 20 of 36 hospitals in Gaza no longer function.
Israel and Washington’s cynicism is breathtaking. There are no differences in intent. Washington only wants it done quickly. Humanitarian corridors? Pauses in the shelling? These are vehicles to facilitate the total depopulation of northern Gaza. The handful of aid trucks allowed through the border at Rafah with Egypt? A public relations gimmick. There is only one goal – kill, kill, kill. The faster the better. All Biden officials talk about is what comes next once Israel has finished its decimation of Gaza. They know Israel’s slaughter will not end until Gazans are living in the open without shelter in the southern part of the strip and dying because of a lack of food, water and medical care.
Gaza before Israel’s ground incursion was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet. Imagine what will happen with 1.1 million Gazans from the north piled on top of over 1 million in the south. Imagine what will take place when infectious diseases such as cholera become an epidemic. Imagine the ravages of starvation. The pressure will build to do something. And that something, Israel hopes, will be to push the Palestinians over the border into the Sinai in Egypt. Once there, they will never return. Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza will be complete. Its ethnic cleansing of the West Bank will begin.
That is Israel’s demented dream. To achieve it, they will make Gaza uninhabitable.
Ask yourself, if you were a Palestinian in Gaza and had access to a weapon what would you do? If Israel killed your family, how would you react? Why would you care about international or humanitarian law when you know it only applies to the oppressed, not the oppressors? If terror is the only language Israel uses to communicate, the only language it apparently understands, wouldn’t you speak back with terror?
Israel’s orgy of death will not crush Hamas. Hamas is an idea. This idea is fed on the blood of martyrs. Israel is giving Hamas an abundant supply.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
He was a member of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for The New York Times coverage of global terrorism, and he received the 2002 Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. Hedges, who holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, is the author of the bestsellers American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for his book War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. He writes an online column for the website ScheerPost. He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, Princeton University and the University of Toronto.
NOTE TO SCHEERPOST READERS FROM CHRIS HEDGES: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my now weekly Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
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Comments
18 responses to “Chris Hedges: The Horror, The Horror, The Horror”
Apparently being complicit in genocide is acceptable, provided that China’s leader accepts to be called a dictator. Brothers if I keep this pace I don’t reach Christmas. One mentally deficient character responsible for genocide, accuses the most powerful leader in the world of being a dictator right to his face. At my age these heavy news are hard to digest, I confess.
But age has its compensations. If one is conscious, one begins to comprehend the absolute heinousness of human beings. From the micro to the macro, we are a damaged species, living in a way that encourages murder, pillage, rape, and endless horror. Meanwhile, there is a garden to tend to, rescued dogs who need love and a good life, letting the grass grow for all the little critters who spend the winter in leaf and grass litter. Without nature, I would succumb to despair.
Israhell truly is a fascist racist evil apartheid regime. May it’s demise be swift and extremely painful and may the ones who support it have the same fate.
Accomplice??
Surely $pon$or, enabler and puppeteer?
How repugnant does one have to be to attack hospitals? How vile dies one have to be where ‘doctors’ in occupied Palestine advocate for the destruction of hospitals?
If any zionist Nazi occupier us reading this, know this: you gave brought on the world’s ire upon yourselves. You are not victims. You will not be able to come back from this….not at all.
LONG LIVE RESISTANCE
LONG LIVE PALESTINE
LONG LIVE THE MARTYRS!
Zionism is a product of Judaism. Israel is a product of Judaism.
Yes, this is exactly right as hedges describes it. and yes, hamas is not just the present fighters it is the response of resistance to decadeslong occupation, oppression, dispossession. but why did hedges pass over putin’s brutality in ukraine so easily. he pretty much justified putin’s invasion, killing, raping. and i think that kind of response from so many on the left helped netanyahu take this decision to be totally inhuman. information house has helped bring this about.
Huh? You stand with Nazis in Ukraine but not in Israel? People’s mental compartmentalization is always bizarre and not a sign of good mental health.
Being called dictator is better than being called warmonger.
At the present rate of slaughter (11,500 slain in 6 weeks) it will take the Israelis at least 21 years to kill the entire population of Gaza – making no allowance for the VERY high birthrate.
Qatar is over thirty times the size of Gaza. Surely the Gazans would be happy to move there and replace the Hindis, Pakistanis and Bengalis who now do all the hard and sweaty jobs in Qatar?
Why should they be forced to leave their homeland? This is exactly what the Israelis want, then they can start making a mess of the rest of the country.
There is only one problem with that scheme, the opposite is true regarding Palestinians residing in Middle East monarchies and Arab countries at large since the 1948 Nakba. They run all sorts of civil service positions as managers, engineers, MDs. architects, chemists, etc. etc. men as well as women. Maybe as a result of their Semitic DNA, they are highly intelligent.
I should also add that they also prosper nicely in the West, for the same reasons and not as ditchdiggers exactly. How much hate and ignorance distorts reality and ruin true perception.
My father who was a high civil servant all his life, told me so about them when I was a kid 70 years ago, not your fault Billy.
The Jews are running out of lies. The Washington Post reported that Israel cannot prove that HAMAS have used any of the hospital being destroyed by Israel. For more than seven decades, the Palestinian people have been subjugated by the Jews (and their U.S.-Western supporters) to a slow-paced Genocide, a hidden holocaust that is suddenly becoming public in Gaza. Western media and Western politicians cannot imagine HAMAS being noble and chivalrous fighters, and Israelis being cowardly child-killing terrorists, though such is obviously the case. Since 07 October 2023, more than 15000 innocent Palestinians, including 5000 children and babies have been murdered in cold blood. The UN Secretary General Guterres said: Israeli Jews have turned “Gaza into a graveyard for children.” In fact, the Jews have turned Gaza hospitals into mass grave graveyards. It does not make sense and you cannot win war by killing women and children unless the aim is Genocide, a real holocaust.
The Jews cannot acknowledge that the vast majority of the world disagrees with them for particularly good reasons, not because of “antisemitism”, but because of the violence they are subjugated the Palestinians to. Arabs are the real Semitic people and Jews are the truly the anti-Semite Zionists.
Thank you for your accurate identification of the true culprits here. Long before Israel, it was called the Jew/Arab conflict. That’s what it still is. Palestinians were always fighting world Jewry, and they still are. It’s an ignorant distortion to say Palestinians are fighting only Israel. If it wasn’t for the US Jewish Community, the Israeli Jews would never get away with what they are doing, thanks to the US Jewish Lobby. Zionist Judaism = Nazi Germany.
Some time ago I was bold enough to suggest basically the same idea. I’m not religious but the opposite, however any well educated person needs to have a basic knowledge of people’s history. In this case the Jewish bible the best source of information about this group of people who provided the basic foundation of the two biggest religions at world level, Christianity and Islam. My actual theory, was that the Jewish bible provided Hitler with all the concepts present in his half baked superior race ideology. His version was based on the racial superiority of the Arian race as he crazily conceived it. While in the bible Jewish preached the same theory on a religious basis, same message same poison.
Golden comment. (⌣́_⌣̀)
Most anti-fascist readers and observers will heartily welcome this article by Chris Hedges. What the Zionists are doing in Gaza makes one wonder what Biden and his accomplices in Tel Aviv have planned to accomplish through this genocide and the destruction of the people living in Gaza. For them, killing and destroying the besieged Palestinians is not more than killing flies. Even the biggest Al-Shifa hospital has been “conquered” by the Israeli army, and bombs are falling on schools and places of shelter.
The issue of international human rights and the observance of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit attacks on hospitals, has been and continues to be largely ignored. That is happening because President Biden and Netanyahu have decided to do so.
The imperial plan for a further expansion of Israel and the ethnic cleansing of the enclave is currently in place. The way to accomplish this plan is to make the lives of 2.3 million Palestinians so unbearable that they seek refuge in Egypt. This will allow the United States, Israel, and their accomplices to take possession of the untapped natural resources in and around Gaza, primarily oil, for their rich dividends.
Israhell truly is a fascist racist evil regime. May it’s demise be swift and painful.