STARVATION AND PLANNED GENOCIDE?
Most recipients who receive any of the missives that I send, are surely not men or women who are experiencing any type of starvation (voluntary diets don’t count). However, if you watch a news station which is less worried about being labeled anti-semitic, and more worried about people recognizing a great humanitarian crisis happening before our often covered eyes, then you are aware of the thousands of children in what is left of Gaza suffering from malnutrition and lacking fundamental medical care. The capricious opening and closing of gates that are capable of letting food and medical supplies into the area appears to be less capricious, and more deliberately cruel. Furthermore, the casual shooting of people just trying to get food, and the bombing of schools and hospitals (sadly with US bombs sent to Israel), creates fear among those who are most hungry, insuring that tens of thousands of Palestinian children will die in the next few weeks if food and medical supplies are not allowed to flow freely into the wasteland of Gaza. Only 14 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are functioning in any capacity, and most face severe shortages of essential resources like fuel, potable water, and medical supplies. causing any hospital to be operating at a limited capacity.
It is very hard not to conclude that the cruelty is deliberate, and part of the plan is not only to eradicate Hamas, but to also eradicate the Palestinian people. Three hospitals in northern Gaza are surrounded by Israeli troops and drones, making them unsafe even for the ordinary Palestinian. With false claims of anti-semitism used against those protesting Israel’s handling of the conflict in Gaza, people are rightly fearful to express any opinion which might be thought to be against the grain. The young man, and new father, Mahmoud Khalil, continues to be detained for his protesting at Columbia University for the rights of Palestinians, and for protesting against any investments in the State of Israel. Mahmoud foolishly thought that living in a democratic country granted him, and hundreds of others, the freedom of highlighting the injustice of what Israel is doing. “As someone who fled prosecution in Syria for my political beliefs, for who I am, I never imagined myself to be in immigration detention, here in the United States,” he wrote. “Why should protesting this Israel government’s indiscriminate killing of thousands of innocent Palestinians result in the erosion of my constitutional rights?” His life as a foreign graduate student has been forever turned upside down, just because he chose to speak truth to power.
Mahmoud Khalil cannot speak for the thousands of people, especially children, who will starve to death because of Israel’s deliberate refusal to halt food and aid to the people of Gaza. By speaking the truth about the annihilation of the Gazan people we are not white-washing the horrors of October 7, 2023, something that can never be condoned. To the extent possible, we must speak up for a people who are not allowed to speak for themselves. The for-profit agencies set up by the US government are grossly ill prepared to meet the needs of the many starving people, and when shots ring out killing and striking fear into the Gaza people, the agencies shut down, worsening the starvation which is already out of control.
Several times a year during my time at St. Isabel we would allow members of the Palestinian community from the Miami area to come and sell their hand-carved olive wood pieces. If you ever bought one of their pieces, it was easy to notice their kindness and gratitude. It is people just like them, and their relatives, that are being slain by the tens of thousands.
It is also worth noting that tens of thousands of people, a majority of them children, will die as a result of our government’s dismantling of its programs providing aid and health care to the needy people of the world. The abolition of USAID will result in thousands of people dying of starvation, and thousands of others, especially on the African continent, will die of Aids, having no means to secure the necessary medicines. PEPFAR, the U.S. government’s global initiative to combat the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which operated in over fifty countries, has also been eliminated. Catholic Relief Services was said to get about half of its budget from the U.S. government, and that has now been cut off. A spokesperson for CRS said programs which provide help to the needy have also been cut off, programs like “Shared Future, a program launched during the first Trump administration to help Christian minorities in northern Iraq support themselves financially with training and education. That assistance was designed to help people at risk of migration or of joining extremist organizations.” Our work for the good of all people is drastically being phased out, so that the wealthy can get even wealthier, and the poor poorer.
No one of us can solve all the world’s problems, but the disbursement of our tax dollars to assist the unfortunate people in the world, is money well spent. Furthermore, where pressure can be used to make governments do the right thing – Israel, Russia, Congress -that pressure should be used unsparingly.
parishionersforjustice.com 