“You take my water, burn my olive trees, destroy my house, take my job, steal my land, imprison my mother and father, kill my brothers, bomb my country, starve us all and humiliate us all. But am to blame: I shot a rocket back”
Noam Chomsky writing about and old man holding a placard after the assault on Gaza in 2008-9
The HAMAS card…the last desperate joker in the deck which is supposed to stop all conversation over Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian people especially in Gaza.
Do not play this card with Jewish lawyer, New Yorker Stanley Cohen.
Virtually nobody outside of Israel accepts the illiterate US envoy to the UN Nikki Haley claim that the massacre of 62 innocents during the Great Return march on the Gaza /Israel border was “measured and proportionate”.
Cohen mocks the threat of burning kites,waving flags and slingshot”weapons of mass destruction.”
The 62 deaths and hundreds of crippled protesters are nothing. Israel could have—and had every right to—kill 500 children in laser guided missiles as it did in 2014…so this was a kinder, gentler warning. Apparently, Palestinians “should give thanks that Israel merely wanted to set a tone with a controlled atrocity,” Cohen writes—and this:
And, predictably, when other excuses have collapsed to the honest lens of public transparency, the Hamas card is once again played with almost sneering contempt for the world’s ability to pierce the half-truths that fly, each day, alongside the Star of David cast throughout the occupied skyline that is Palestine.
What about proportionality, Mr.Cohen?
“You excuse an unchecked attack by the 16th most powerful military force of our time, with thousands of tanks, aircraft and combat ships, with a multibillion dollar yearly military budget, upon a largely tattered urban enclave armed with little more than the determination and spirit of its long embattled people.It works.It has for decades.
Now Mr Cohen unlike Rosie Dimanno, Yair Rosenberg et al has been to Gaza, knows Hamas intimately, has actually as a lawyer–and obviously a “self-hating Jew”– represented Hamas. Some, he says are close personal friends.how can this be isn’t HAMAS the incarnation of Hitler, maybe Stalin?
The HAMAS card
“I have spent literally thousands of hours meeting with movement leaders in prisons, at conferences, in Palestine and elsewhere. These are virtuous, dedicated, nationalists who seek not power for the sake of it or personal profit but have long stood among those who have fought against overwhelming odds and violence to lead the way toward a Palestinian home built of the marrow of freedom, justice and equality.
Contrary to the Israeli and Western effort to reduce Hamas to a collective of essentially unschooled or unsophisticated foreign born so-called Islamists, nothing could be further from the truth. Hamas is a movement born of Palestine, composed of Palestinians who were raised on the very streets where the blood of their people and families, has been lost to the occupation terror imposed by Israel. For the many who suffer from a now decade old blockade of Gaza–with its lack of food, water, medicine and mobility–Hamas and their families have known the same isolation and paid a like price.