https://edwardcurtin.com/jesus-gaza-and-the-murder-of-useless-people/
Jesus, Gaza, and the Murder of Useless People
Jesus was a Palestinian Jew born in Bethlehem. He grew up in Nazareth and was executed as a criminal in Jerusalem. It is because of him that we celebrate Christmas. But it is in spite of him that what we celebrate is the opposite of what he stood for.
The different stories of his birth, told by Mathew and Luke in the New Testament, which are the bases for Christmas, are not filled with sugar plum fairies and sleighs filled with useless, unnecessary consumer goods. There’s nothing about a Jolly Old St. Nicholas or baked ham or candy canes. No gifts to return in a frenzied rush that replicates their purchase. No credit card bills that come due in the new year. No “Jingle Bell Rock” with Brenda Lee or “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby.
Just a poor child’s birth to fulfill a prophecy that out of life would come death and out of death would come life. That hope was improbable but possible with faith.
These birth narratives, which tell of a nativity that concludes with the grown child’s suffering, public crucifixion, death, and Resurrection – a story that lives on with the suffering of so many innocents – are, as Gary Wills puts it in What the Gospels Meant, “. . . far from feel-good stories. They tell of a family outcast and exiled, hunted and rejected. They tell of children killed, of a sword to pierce the mother’s heart, of a judgment on the nations.” They are stories of rejection, massacre, and a desperate flight from death at an early age. They are not what most people now consider to be the essence of Christmas since a radical Palestinian Jew’s story has been almost totally erased by the glitz and greed of getting and spending to fuel an economy geared for war and killing.
Mathew and Luke’s birth narratives are replicated again and again throughout history, presently and most conspicuously in Gaza and the West Bank, as the massacre of the innocents continues under today’s King Herod, Benjamin Netanyahu, the client king of Washington, not Rome, while U.S. politicians, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who claims to be a defender of children and opposed to U.S. war policies, support this genocide with rhetorical justifications that the Trappist monk Thomas Merton called the unspeakable:
It is the void that contradicts everything that is spoken even before the words are said; the void that gets into the language of public and official declarations at the very moment when they are pronounced, and makes them ring dead with the hollowness of the abyss. It is the void out of which Eichmann drew the punctilious exactitude of his obedience . . .
To the shock of so many of Kennedy’s early supporters, he claims, among other unspeakable assertions, that the Israelis have been the innocent victims of the Palestinians for 75 years, and they “could flatten Gaza” if they chose to, but instead have kindly used high-tech explosives “to avoid civilian casualties”; that they are not committing genocide intentionally. Indeed, his defense of the indefensible Israeli war crimes is widely shared by the compromised political leadership of both parties in Washinton, D.C., a place Kennedy is hoping to reach as the top of the heap, but he is contradicting all his talk about spiritual renewal and healing the divide, and it is especially galling and hypocritical as we try to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace.
While the genocide of Palestinians is being documented every ongoing day now, the Gospel stories are different in that they were written after the fact and were not based on eyewitness testimony but are narratives of deep symbolic faith significance, historically wrong in places, but told to signify religious truths of the early Christian faith community.
Once there was a mother and father with their child on the run to safety in Egypt; today there are millions of Palestinian refugees on a bombed-out unarmed road of flight to nowhere but a dead-end.
A few days ago my wife and I were caring for our son’s two dogs. Down the hill as night came on, the town set off fireworks – those bombs bursting in air (Oh how lovely is war!) – to celebrate and encourage people to buy holiday gifts, what can only fairly be described as acquisitive consumer madness that many realize yet have accepted as an essential part of the Christmas message. As the fireworks exploded loudly, the dogs started to quake uncontrollably and we had to hold them tight to comfort them.
Yes, they are animals, but sentient animals with deep feelings; and yes, they are not children in Gaza quivering in fear as the Israelis bomb them night and day in savage attacks. But as we held those frightened dogs, feeling their hearts beat fast as they gasped for breath, the visceral sense of what those Palestinians must be feeling, as they hold their trembling children who are butchered as useless objects, overwhelmed me. As they are “thinned out,” as Netanyahu is reported to have said, I felt sick at heart to be living safely in a country that finances and supports such slaughter. A country in which buying and selling is the real religion, people have become commodities, and Christmas has become the celebration of such grotesqueries.
I keep thinking of the difference between human beings and things; life and death; money and power; acquisitiveness and poverty; and, as Norman O. Brown puts it in Life Against Death, “an economy driven by a pure sense of guilt, unmitigated by any sense of redemption.”
In his classic study, Brown makes clear that it is erroneous to think that the secular and the sacred are exclusive opposites, as if the secular has replaced the “irrational” beliefs of religion with clean science and logical thinking; has banished irrational superstitions with abstract, objective, quantitative, and impersonal thinking. On the contrary, he argues that the whole modern secular money complex – the spirit of capitalism – is rooted in the psychology of guilt and the secular sacred. He writes:
The psychological realities here are best grasped in terms of theology, and were already grasped by Luther. Modern secularism, and its companion Protestantism, do not usher in an era in which human consciousness is liberated from supernatural manifestations; the essence of the Protestant (or capitalist) era is that the power over this world has passed from God to God’s negation, God’s ape, the Devil. And already Luther had seen in money the essence of the secular, and therefore of the demonic. The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God’s ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.
Things, just like money, beyond a certain minimum necessary for a simple life of use, do not, as everyone knows, bring happiness. This is because they are dead – excrement – the Devil’s favorite toy.
Take all those useless and superfluous objects people exchange during the holiday season. The disposable gifts that are purchased to ease the guilt of giving and receiving. Or such “objects” as an autograph of a famous person, an art work such as Andy Warhol’s Shot Sage Blue Marilyn that sold at auction last year for $195 million, Babe Ruth’s bat, Princess Diana’s evening dress ($1,148 million at auction), antlers over a fireplace and trophies of all sorts – the examples are manifold – they serve to confer on their owners a sacred prestige (etymology = deception, illusion) that is pure magic. Like vast piles of money, they are talismanic protectors against death. Their magical properties are irrational and rarely acknowledged, for to do so would reveal the absurdity of their acquisition and the pathetic nihilistic core of their owners. They are outward signs of inward barrenness, yet for those who possess these useless objects they are magic ordure.
The more expensive the objects the more social power they mystically confer, since the message is that the owner can always give it up for a pot of gold but doesn’t have to since they are sitting on a lot more gold, which is really a pot of shit. In other words, wealth, its possession and the avid desire for it, signifies power over people and that power includes using them in many ways, including their labor, and killing them if one chooses, quickly or slowly, overtly or deviously, directly or indirectly, for some people are useless objects, inferior people.
Such power is central to politics and warfare, as a quick glance at the wealth of war-promoting politicians will reveal.
It is central to the widespread thinking today that the world is filled with useless people who must be disposed of one way or the other.
It is a fundamental tenet of the World Economic Forum, the Gates-Rockefeller et al. crowd, and the racist eugenics promoters today and yesterday.
It is behind the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) biological weapons gain-of-function research, the Covid-19 propaganda, and the CIA’s and Defense Department’s distribution of the mRNA countermeasures (“vaccines”).
It is central to the hideously obscene profits of the medical military-industrial complex and the world-wide arms industry.
It is central to the genocide taking place in Gaza. For the Israeli rulers, the problem is that the Palestinians exist, so they must be exterminated.
It’s still the same old story told differently down through the ages.
Hitler enacted it against the Jews.
Once long ago, it was a Palestinian Jewish boy born in a manger destined to make trouble for the rulers of the empire who had to be eliminated one way or another. Today that child of God is any Palestinian child, destined, we are told by the rulers of Israel, to grow into a terrorist animal.
Christmas is about a birth, the birth of a boy who would become a man who sided with the outcasts, the poor, the forsaken, the gentle, and the peacemakers. His birth and life was a rebuke to the powerful and the rich who lord it over the innocent, the killers, those who profit at the expense of others, who amass wealth and useless possessions to parade their power, a show of power which, unknown to their self-obsessed minds, is a sign of their spiritual nullity.
I have nothing against Santa. I once sat on his lap and he seemed nice to my four year-old mind. He was fat and jolly. He told me I would get what I wanted for Christmas. But he forgot to tell me what Christmas was really about.
That is what I want. To remember.
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https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-gaza-not-about-hamas-about-demographics/5843618
The War in Gaza: It’s Not About Hamas. It’s About Demographics
We’ve been told repeatedly that the goal of Israel’s operation in Gaza is to “defeat Hamas”. But is that true? We don’t think it is. We don’t think that any reasonable person would attempt to eradicate a militant organization by laying to waste vast swaths of the country while killing tens of thousands of innocent people. That is not how one garners support for one’s cause nor is it an effective strategy for defeating the enemy. Instead, it is a policy that is guaranteed to horrify allies and critics alike greatly undermining the operation’s chances of success. And that’s why we don’t believe that Israel’s attack on Gaza has anything to do with Hamas. We think it’s a smokescreen that’s being used to divert attention from the real objectives of the campaign.
And, what might those “real objectives” be?
The real objectives relate to an issue that is never discussed in the media, but is the primary factor driving events. Demographics.
As we all know, Israel’s long-term plan is to incorporate Gaza and the West Bank into Greater Israel. They want to control all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
The problem is, however, that if they annex the occupied territories without disposing of the people, then the Palestinian population will equal or exceed that of the Jews which would lead to the demise of the Jewish state. That is the basic problem in a nutshell. Check out this article that helps to explain what’s going on:
Demography is a matter of national security in Israel and a key indicator for Israeli-Palestinian relations and their outlook: demographic trends in Israel are rapidly shifting and this will impact prospects for violence and conflict resolution.
As of late 2022, over seven million Israelis lived in Israel and the West Bank, and seven million Palestinians lived in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Israel and East Jerusalem, a somehow integrated region referred to as “Greater Israel” by Jewish right-wing activists …
A demographic bomb is already ticking. Israeli Jews experience an existential fear to be outgrown by the Palestinian population,and this is further instrumentalized by right-wing nationalist political entrepreneurs. Demography lies at the core of the territorial dispute between Jews and Arabs, as the two nations are waging a major war on numbers, aimed at weaponizing fertility rates to turn them into a predictive assumption of victory.
As the current Israeli right-wing government is laying the ground for the de facto annexation of the West Bank’s Area C, demography has been one of the tools employed to reassure the Jewish public opinion that Judea and Samaria could still be integrated into Israel, while keeping a Jewish demographic majority. However, demography remains a struggle for survival and an uphill battle for Israel. This is especially true if Israel were to progress with the Palestinian Area C annexation. Israel: A Demographic Ticking Bomb in Today’s One-State Reality”, Aspenia
As an American, diversity might not seem like such a big deal. But to many Israelis, it’s pure strychnine. Zionists, in particular, see growth in the Arab population as a “demographic time-bomb” that threatens the future of the Jewish state. And that’s what the Gaza fracas is really all about; getting rid of the people but keeping the land. In fact, the last 75 years of conflict can be reduced to just 8 words, “They want the land, but not the people.” Here’s more from the Times of Israel:
Jewish people make up less than 47 percent of all those living west of the Jordan River, an Israeli demographer warned Tuesday, claiming that most of the Israeli population is unaware of the democratic peril the country is sliding into by possibly becoming a ruling minority in the area.
Arnon Soffer, a professor of geography at Haifa University, told Army Radio Tuesday that in addition to the Jewish and Arab populations, he reached his figures by taking into consideration the hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish people residing in Israel who are not citizens.
According to Soffer, there are 7.45 million Jews and others along with 7.53 million Arab Israelis and Palestinians living in what he termed the Land of Israel, meaning Israel plus the West Bank and Gaza Strip. When the number of non-Israeli nationals is taken into consideration, it leaves the Jewish proportion at between 46% and 47% of the total, he claimed.
According to Israel’s official Central Bureau of Statistics, at the end of 2021, 9.449 million people live in Israel (including Israelis in West Bank settlements). Of those, 6.982 million (74 percent) are Jewish, 1.99 million (21%) are Arab and 472,000 (5%) are neither…. The Palestinian Bureau of Statistics puts the West Bank Palestinian population at a little over 3 million, and the Gaza population at just over 2 million.
Soffer explained to Army Radio that although the birthrate has been higher among the Jewish population in recent years, so too is the death rate, meaning the Arab population, which is far younger on average than the Jewish population, is growing faster. Jews now a 47% minority in Israel and the territories, demographer says, The Times of Israel
Imagine, for a minute, that you posted a number of articles on your social media sites that said you thought there were too many blacks or Asians in America. How long do you think it would take before you were either shadow-banned, censored or buried under an avalanche of death threats? But when we look at the contents of the article above, we see that a major newspaper in Israel breezily publishes an article which states in stark terms that the country faces “democratic peril” because there are too many Arabs in the areas earmarked for future annexation. How is that not racism?
But this is how the issue is discussed in Israel. Demographics are considered a national security issue, an existential issue, and an issue that will decide the future of the Jewish State. Is it any wonder why the reaction has been so extreme? Is it any wonder why people refer to the fact that there is a large population of Palestinians in Palestine as the “Arab problem”? And, of course, once the indigenous population is regarded as a “problem”, then it is incumbent on the political leaders to conjure-up a solution.
So, what exactly is the solution to the Arab problem?
Why fewer Arabs, of course. Which is why the idea of expelling the Palestinians has a long pedigree in Zionist thinking dating back a full five decades before the establishment of the Jewish state. As it happens, the Arabs were always a problem even when the Jews represented less than 10 percent of the population. Go figure? Check out this comment by the ideological father of political Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, who wrote the following:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
Shockingly, Herzl wrote those words in 1895, 50 years before Israel declared its statehood. And many of the Zionist leaders who followed him shared that same world view, like Israel’s first prime minister David Ben-Gurion who said:
“You are no doubt aware of the [Jewish National Fund’s] activity in this respect. Now a transfer of a completely different scope will have to be carried out. In many parts of the country new settlement will not be possible without transferring the Arab fellahin.” He concluded: “Jewish power [in Palestine], which grows steadily, will also increase our possibilities to carry out this transfer on a large scale.” (1948)
And here’s Ben-Gurion again in 1938: “I support compulsory transfer. I don’t see anything immoral in it.”
See how far back this line of reasoning goes? The Zionists were tweaking their ethnic cleansing plans long before Israel had even become a state. And for good reason. They knew that the numbers did not support the prospects for an enduring Jewish State. The only way to square the circle was through compulsory resettlement, otherwise known as “transfer.” And while that policy might have been repugnant to a great many Jews, a far larger number undoubtedly believed it was a cruel necessity. The preservation of the Jewish State became the highest value permitting behavior that would otherwise be disparaged as unacceptable and immoral. Here’s how Ben Shapiro summed it up in an essay titled “Transfer is Not a Dirty Word”:
The time for half measures has passed…. Some have rightly suggested that Israel be allowed to decapitate the terrorist leadership of the Palestinian Authority. But this, too, is only a half measure. The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership.…
Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum….
The Jews don’t realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. There are no gas chambers here. It’s not genocide; it’s transfer….
It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution. Transfer is Not a Dirty Word, Narkive
The importance of the Shapiro piece can’t be overstated. First, he explicitly links the future viability of the Jewish state to the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Second, he acknowledges that transfer is “an ugly solution”, but supports the policy as a necessary evil. And, third, he justifies the implementation of the mass expulsion by putting the entire Palestinian population into the same category as the terrorists. (“The ideology of the Palestinian population is indistinguishable from that of the terrorist leadership.”) So, in essence, Shapiro is making our case for us. He is candidly admitting that the only policy that will preserve the Jewish state is ethnic cleansing. And judging by developments on the ground, we must assume the Netanyahu government arrived at the same conclusion. The people of Gaza are being bombed, starved and terrorized all with the explicit aim of herding them in the direction of the southern border where they will be forced at gunpoint to flee their historic homeland.
Bottom line: The strategic objectives of the Israeli operation in Gaza are entirely different than the stated goal of defeating Hamas.
All of the land west of the Jordan River is now being cleared of its native occupants so it can be incorporated into Greater Israel while maintaining a sizable Jewish majority.
The demonizing of the Palestinian people –which casts the victims of this onslaught as the perpetrators– is intended to conceal the underlying policy that is based on racial discrimination. There is no doubt that if the Arabs in Gaza were of Jewish descent, they would be spared the genocide they face today.
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