UNITED NATIONS, Jan 8 (IPS) - The devastating Israeli firepower, unleashed largely on Palestinian civilians in Gaza during two weeks of fighting, is the product of advanced U.S. military technology.
The U.S. weapons systems used by the Israelis -- including F-16 fighter planes, Apache helicopters, tactical missiles and a wide array of munitions -- have been provided by Washington mostly as outright military grants.
The administration of President George W. Bush alone has provided over 21 billion dollars in U.S. security assistance over the last eight years, including 19 billion dollars in direct military aid as freebies.
"Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," says a background briefing released Thursday by the Arms and Security Initiative of the New York-based New America Foundation.
Everyday you go to work, the government takes a chunk of what you earn, and sends it to Israel in the form of aid, or military equipment. The harder you work, the more money you make, the more you are contributing to the slaughter of Palestinians, Christian and Muslim alike, because white phosphorous does not look for a cross or a crescent, it just burns the skin to the bone. Smart bombs are not intelligent enough to ascertain whether they are hitting a school or a bunker.
You think that this being a democracy, if you were appalled you might try to reach your congressperson and try to force an end to the senseless slaughter of human beings being funded out of your pocket. But this is no democracy. What we have a military-industrial corpocracy. Your role in it is to keep making dollars for the government to spend on weapons to send to Israel to test out on Palestinians.
You are as trapped as the people of Gaza, virtual slaves to a machine that only kills for them, while doing nothing for you except insuring the enmity of people who are not afraid to die because their life is shit now anyway.
4 comments:
We need to cut off Israel's welfare. Show them some toughlove. If they want to bully everybody else in the Middle East, let them pay for it themselves.
Let Israel feel the pride and satisfaction of knowing that they're paying their own way, instead of begging for handouts from American taxpayers.
Would you want Hamas as your neighbor? Launching rockets at your home? When the UN is now in an uproar, where were they when the rockets red glare. Was bursting in the town square? Funny how easy it is to forget. Israel is the one under attack. If Hamas and Gaza resident are so innocent... why the need to smuggle in rockets? How much food and water could they have bought instead of rockets? If I was your neighbor. Shooting at your wife and kids. You could call the police. But.... if they never show up. How long would it be before you defend your family? When there are no rockets. No suicide bombers. Just civilized neighbors. Gaza will unlock its own cage. They hold the key to there cell. Misbehave its locked. Civilized its unlocked. Is that too hard to understand?
Guy,
Hamas was honoring the previous cease fire when Israel violated by executing Hamas leaders in Gaza.
How would you feel if when your new neighbors moved in, they kept taking more and more of your land away from you. Then they started parking their tanks on your land, and when your children threw rocks at those tanks, they were killed. Then they took more of your land and started building their buildings on it. You went to police to complain, but their good friend the US of A stepped in and blocked the police from action, or allowed you to ignore any citation the police gave you.
The truth is both sides are wrong. But another truth is we destroyed Iraq for violating less UN resolutions than Israel stands in violation of now. And I'm sick of Israel playing the victim, in nearly every case, they have been the aggressor, stealing more Palestinian land, destroying century old olive groves, and illegally building settlements on land they stole from Palestine. And all of this criminal activity is funded with aid dollars from the US. I say it's time to cut off the funding of genocide by Israel against Palestine with my tax dollars. Let the Israeli fascists fund themselves!
The whole thing is so depressing.
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