"Do Americans need to suffer?"

The urgency of peace.

U.S. carnage: Wounded child, no surviving family. Six year-old Palestinian girl with third degree burns over 50% of her body. (Al Jazeera screen shot, November 2023,)

The United States continues to provide political and diplomatic cover for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. It provides almost all of the weapons Israel is using as it carries out its final solution to the Palestinian problem.

Now the U.S. and its Western lapdogs have cut funding to the UNRWA—the only source of food and aid to the people of Gaza—based solely on unproven allegations that 13 aid workers were involved in the 7 October Hamas attack. This supposed information was obtained through interrogations conducted by the Israeli army which is known for its brutal torture of prisoners. Only later did Israel produce dubious “intelligence” to back up its assertions. As many commentators have pointed out, Israel has lied so often it should never be believed.

As expected, The New York Times and other U.S. media sources have amplified Israel’s claim without any independent corroboration, in short, without any actual evidence. Israel has long wanted to destroy the UNRWA because it is the main source of aid to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

By cutting funding to the UNRWA, the United States is directly enabling genocide by starvation. My reference to “Americans” in the following commentary refers specifically and solely to citizens of the United States.

—C.M.

31 JANUARY—Do Americans need to be bombed, to live in rubble, without adequate shelter, food, or water, with the roar of fighter jets and the ceaseless deafening sound of artillery overhead?

Do Americans need to be terrorized, forced to live in fear, have their cities, towns, hospitals, schools, and homes destroyed? 

Do we need to see the bodies of our loved ones—mother and father, uncles, aunts, Grandparents, sisters and brother, children and babies—torn apart? 

Do we need to see our friends and neighbors incinerated in the fireball of a U.S.-made hellfire missile fired from a U.S.-made drone? 

Do we need to learn to tremble every time we hear a sound or see something moving in the sky? 

What will it take for Americans to value peace, to prioritize diplomacy, to wake up to the lies of our government and corporate media, to defund our military, to break up the monstrous military contractors that profit from war? 

Do Americans need to experience exactly what we have put countless millions of other people through and what we are doing currently to the Palestinians in Gaza? 

If Americans experienced the true costs of war would we finally understand the urgency of peace?

Do Americans need to suffer?

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