The Slaughter of the Innocents

(LONDON) - ¹³When the Magi (the three wise men) had gone an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

¹⁴So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt...

¹⁶When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.

¹⁷Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled: ¹⁸ “A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.” - The Gospel according to Saint Matthew: 2.13 – 18.

That was then, when the infant Jesus could find a safe haven and sanctuary in Egypt. Which is more that can be said for the children of Gaza today looking to find a safe haven in present day Egypt under the dictatorship of Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi.

Two thousand years ago when the world was under the hegemony of the Roman Empire it was a very different world from today.

We now live under the hegemony of the United States of America, the most powerful empire on earth ever. An empire with a foreign policy dictated, scripted, designed and played out by the Neo Cons in Washington and the Neo Fascists Nazis in Tel Aviv.

You might have hoped that the human race had developed and advanced beyond blood lust and blood shedding.

Not a bit of it. For the last century what humankind has excelled at is weapons of mass destruction at a fearsome level. Weapons that could annihilate an entire nation at the push of a button. And one of the fingers poised over that button is Israeli. The unfortunate consequence of this is the continued slaughter of my people in Palestine.

Let me refresh your memory. Long before Hamas was even thought of the Jewish terrorist gangs, most notably the Irgun Gang, the Stern Gang and the Haganah committed horrific acts of slaughter in Palestine. The bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 22 1946 resulted in 91 killed, 46 injured, most of whom were British.

This grotesque massacre hastened the departure of the British mandatory authority from Palestine, thus abandoning the innocent, defenceless Palestinians to their fate.

The anniversary of this massacre was only two days ago, but you would be hard pushed to find one British politician or journalist who remembered it. They were all far too busy clamouring to pronounce that Israel has a right to defend itself. The British dead, conveniently forgotten.

Two years later, came the slaughter of Deir Yassin in 1948 lead by the Irgun Terrorist group, headed by Menachim Begin. Begin was proud of his role in the slaughter of 254 people, mostly elderly men, women and children, pointing out that the panic among residents causing them to flee from their homes made it easy for the Zionists to take control of Palestine.

"That terror,” he said, "was worth more than 1000 tanks.” Mr. Begin then went on to become Prime Minister of Israel and was a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

The founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, went one better, stating that ‘without Deir Yassin there would be no Israel.’ This is the same Ben-Gurion, who, when writing to his son long before the establishment of the Zionist, fascist state, said clearly ‘we must expel the Arabs and take their place’.

Just a month later, in May 1948, the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah Gang ransacked and burned to the ground the village of Ein El Zeytoun, killing 70 villagers; many were captured and paraded through the streets of west Jerusalem to emphasize the terror that was to come.

The message to the Palestinians was clear. ‘If you don’t leave this is what you should expect.’

And then came the war of so-called independence where the slaughter of the innocent in Palestine yet again was the order of the day.

"We walked outside, Ben-Gurion accompanying us. General Allon, (commander of the Israeli Military Forces)repeated his question, What is to be done with the Palestinian population?' Ben-Gurion waved his hand in a gesture which said 'Drive them out!'" - Yitzhak Rabin, leaked censored version of Rabin memoirs, published in the New York Times, 23 October 1979.

Ben-Gurion also warned in 1948: "We must do everything to insure they (the Palestinians) never do return." Assuring his fellow Zionists that Palestinians would never come back to their homes said.” The old will die and the young will forget."

Throughout this time and right up to the present day Israel has portrayed itself, very successfully, as the victim. Somehow the illegal squatters, the terrorist gangs, the early Zionists and their supporters became the lonely lamb in a sea of ravaging Arabs.

All this, despite the documented plans by the founders of Israel to destroy not only Palestine, but the neighbouring Arab countries.

"We should prepare to go over to the offensive. Our aim is to smash Lebanon, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. The weak point is Lebanon, for the Moslem regime is artificial and easy for us to undermine. We shall establish a Christian state there, and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate Trans-Jordan; Syria will fall to us. We then bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria and Sinai." - David Ben-Gurion, May 1948, to the General Staff. From Ben-Gurion, A Biography, by Michael Ben-Zohar, Delacorte, New York 1978.

Ever on the offensive they marched. They marched into Egypt in 1956, in collaboration with Britain and France, wearing their ‘victim’ label and the world applauded.

They marched in 1967 upon Egypt, Syria and Jordan, aided and abetted by western powers; still the victim, still the under-dogs, still defending themselves.

A momentary hiccup was the small and totally forgotten act of belligerence, remembered here for my American readers, when the Israeli ‘Defence’ Force attacked an American ship ‘USS Liberty’ in 1967, killing 34 American servicemen.

A retired Admiral, Thomas Moorer, former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman who spent a year investigating the attack and is a top legal council agrees that Israel intended to sink the USS Liberty and blame Egypt for it, thus dragging the United States into a war on Israel's behalf.

This act of aggression, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, was concluded to be an accident, a case of mistaken identity.

“Why would our government put Israel’s interests ahead of our own?” Moorer asked from his wheelchair at the news conference. He was Chief of Naval Operations at the time of the attack. Why indeed?

As one survivor said, “If it was an accident it was the best planned accident I ever heard of.”

Yet the Israelis were still the victims of oppression and the world stood by and nodded its head.

In 1982 they marched into Lebanon, killing thousands of innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians. Their march continued on into Beirut where they allowed their old allies, the Phalange Party of Lebanon, to massacre hundreds, possibly thousands of Palestinian men, women and children in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatilla, while the then Defence Minister of Israel, Arial Sharon, stood guard.

Sharon’s role in this obscene slaughter identified him as a recognized war criminal. It was only his death in January this year, after a prolonged coma that gave him his escape from justice for his numerous crimes against humanity.

The Israeli bombing of 17 villages around Qana in southern Lebanon in 1996 was another act of deliberate aggression, designed to terrorize its citizens into accepting Tel Aviv’s rule over them.

Israeli military men who participated in this slaughter of Lebanese civilians said that the attack was justified; that they have no regrets; and that those who were killed were just "a bunch of Arabs" whose lives are not important.”

The Israeli military commander who led these men declared: "We did our duty. They deserve to die because they are only Arabs." An Israeli soldier told "Kol Ha'Irr", an Israeli magazine, "I obeyed the orders. My conscience does not bother me at all. We should have fired more shells to kill more Arabs. One Arab more, one Arab less, you know.”

The list is endless and the picture gets darker and darker and the intentions are still the same. A detailed evil plan to ethnically cleanse our land to create a supremacist, racist, fascist, Nazi state exclusively for the Jews.

Most people accuse us Arabs of living in the past. And that we don’t miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

I am going to indulge you here and ask you to bear with me and look at what the current crop of Neo Nazis in Tel Aviv have in their hearts, which, on occasion, they articulate.

“The only thing that can deter terrorists, like those who kidnapped the children and killed them, is the knowledge that their sister or their mother will be raped.” This assertion was made by Middle East scholar Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University (Lt Col. IDF Military Intelligence).

“It sounds very bad, but that’s the Middle East,” added Kedar, of Bar-Ilan’s Department of Arabic. The interview was on Israeli radio on July 1st 2014.

Ayelet Shaked, a young woman member of Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, reportedly calls on her Facebook page for murdering the mothers of what she terms Palestinian “terrorists” (anyone who opposes Israeli rule) so that they cannot give birth to more “little snakes”:

According to Ms Shaked, they have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists.

Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, urges the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave.

Aron Soffer, head of research and lecturer at the Israeli Defence Forces and the architect of the Israeli apartheid system, was quoted by the Jerusalem Post on October 10, 2007 and exposed on YouTube when he stated:

“When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it’s going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will become even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It’s going to be a terrible war. So if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill... all day... every day. If we don’t kill, we will cease to exist." (Video below)

And there we are. The killing machine known as the Israeli Defence Force is rolling over Gaza as we I write these words, following the advice of Mr. Soffer.

According to Baroness Valerie Amos, UN Under-Secretary-General for humanitarian affairs a child in Gaza is killed every hour of every day of this latest invasion into Gaza. So far the tally is over 700* dead, over 85% of them are civilians, 200 are children. Over 4000 are injured in the most horrendous and horrifying ways, 1700 of which are children who are traumatized and bewildered.

When you live under lock and key for over 8 years, when all doors, windows and keyholes are closed around you to the point where you can’t breathe are you justified, maybe, to resist? Not according to the Magi (wise men) of Whitehall or in the American Congress or the Champs Elysee Palace in Paris. Israel has a right to defend itself. This last Thursday night, while the Neo-Nazi army was marching into Gaza the US Senate voted unanimously to support Israel’s ongoing invasion with not one dissenting vote.

In fact, the unanimous Senate went on to approve a further $429 million to be transferred immediately to Israel to further fund the iron dome missile system. As self-confessed Zionist, Vice President, Joe Biden said:

“If there were not an Israel we would have to invent one to make sure our interests were preserved.”

His boss, the President of the United States of America, Mr. Barack Obama has proclaimed on many occasions that America will always have Israel’s back.

Is there anyone out there, Arab, Western, Eastern, we’re not choosy, who has our back?

Jafar M Ramini is a Palestinian writer, commentator and analyst on Middle Eastern affairs living in London.

He was born in Jenin, northern Palestine, was educated in England and spent the early years of his working life in the Arabian Gulf and Saudi Arabia. He has traveled far and wide, searching for the answer to a question that still eludes him.

Why does the United States of America support the Zionist line in such a blind folded way while ignoring the legitimate rights of the indigenous Palestinian people? Particularly as the Palestinian people harbour no ill feelings towards America and its people nor has ever caused them any harm. It is, Jafar says, a conundrum.