Opinion

Zionist Genocide of Palestinians Continues

Kevin Barrett

Dhu al-Qa'dah 29, 14402019-08-01

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On July 12, 2019, a nine-year-old Palestinian boy, ‘Abd al-Rahman Shtaiwi, was sitting in front of a West Bank home in the village of Kafr Qaddum. Suddenly a Zionist-Israeli bullet ripped through his head, exploding into more than 70 fragments leaving him in a long-term coma.

A Palestinian demonstration was ongoing more than 200 meters away. Israeli soldiers in body armor and helmets responded to the “threat” of a handful of children harmlessly throwing stones from a distance of dozens of meters with a mixture of rubber bullets and live fire. Did they fire live rounds into the air, one of which, through bad luck, accidentally killed ‘Abd al-Rahman, who was not even participating in the demonstration? Or did an Israeli sniper murder the boy as a sick attempt to terrorize Palestinians in hopes of quelling the demonstrations?

It is a well-established fact that Israeli snipers deliberately murder Palestinian children with impunity as a matter of de facto national policy. A 2004 article in the British Medical Journal documented more than 600 cases of Palestinian children shot by Israeli snipers,

Two-thirds of the 621 children (two-thirds under 15 years) killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of the cases to the head, neck and chest — the sniper’s wound. Clearly, soldiers are routinely authorised to shoot to kill children in situations of minimal or no threat.

Journalist Chris Hedges, in “Gaza Diary,” offers a graphic account of several such murders,

Yesterday at this spot the Israelis shot eight young men, six of whom were under the age of eighteen. One was twelve. This afternoon they kill an eleven-year-old boy, Ali Murad, and seriously wound four more, three of whom are under eighteen. Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered…but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.

Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, calls Palestinian children “little snakes” who must be killed. She also advocates killing their mothers. Her wardrobe presumably includes the popular IDF T-shirt depicting a pregnant Palestinian woman with a target on her belly, featuring the slogan, “One shot two kills.”

Clearly the Zionists harbor genocidal intent. But are Zionists actually committing genocide, as that crime is defined in international law? The unequivocal answer is “yes.” In August 2013, international law professor Francis Boyle successfully argued before the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, “The Palestinians have been the victims of genocide as defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.” According to that Convention,

…genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group such as:

a. killing members of the group;

b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part…

The modern Zionist movement, from its inception, has been dedicated to annihilating the Palestinian people through mass murder and threats thereof; the destruction of livelihood; the destruction of religious and cultural heritage; and the destruction of life-supporting infrastructure. As Professor Boyle argued before the Tribunal,

For over the past six and one-half decades, the Israeli government and its predecessors-­in­-law — the Zionist agencies, forces, and terrorist gangs — have ruthlessly implemented a systematic and comprehensive military, political, religious, economic, and cultural campaign with the intent to destroy in substantial part the national, ethnical, racial, and different religious group (Jews versus Muslims and Christians) constituting the Palestinian people.

The modern West has been taught to abhor genocide. It has even raised the Nazi genocide against European Jews to the status of a post-Christian secular religion! The crucifixion has been replaced by the gas chambers; Jesus (as) has been replaced by the Jewish people; and the miraculous resurrection has been replaced by the rise of the so-called state of Israel. This new religion even features its own Holy Trinity: six million victims, gas chambers, and an official Hitler extermination order and bureaucratic plan for its implementation. Revisionist historians who question this Holy Trinity are deemed heretics and mercilessly persecuted by Zionist Torquemadas.

Yet even as the West drowns in a flood of Zionist propaganda about a horrific event that happened in Germany during World War II, the Zionists continue their genocide of Palestinians. The genocide perpetrators get away with their crime by shamelessly posing as victims.

The cruelty of the Zionist genocide of Palestinians is deliberately hidden by Western mainstream media. If you follow corporate media you probably never heard of Nasir Majid Taqatqa, a 31-year-old Palestinian who was abducted by the Zionists on June 19, 2019 and tortured to death, his martyrdom occurring on July 16. According to the Palestinian Prisoner Society, Zionist torture of Palestinian prisoners is rampant, with at least 200 dying in custody since the Society began keeping records. Currently there are roughly 5,800 Palestinian prisoners held by the Zionists under atrocious conditions, of whom 700 suffer from chronic diseases without receiving adequate healthcare.

It isn’t just IDF snipers who murder Palestinian children. On July 15, 2019, one day before Nasir Majid Taqatqa’s death in prison, an Israeli squatter-driver ran over and killed seven-year-old Tariq Zebania while the boy was riding his bicycle near al-Khalil (Hebron). The Israeli police made no effort to identify, much less apprehend, the suspect. Such events are a regular occurrence in Colonized Palestine.

Since March 2018 the most active site for Zionist killing of Palestinian children has been the border of the Gaza open-air concentration camp, where the nonviolent Great March of Return demonstrations have faced murderous Zionist repression. Of the almost 300 unarmed protestors murdered by Zionist snipers, at least 41 were children (according to Jewish Voices for Peace).

More than 30,000 Palestinians, including thousands of children, have been injured by Zionist forces during the Great March of Return. Many of those 30,000 injured were intentionally maimed and will remain crippled for life. Amnesty International has denounced the Zionists’ “deliberate efforts to kill and maim,” describing countless victims, among them “23-year-old football player Muhammad Khalil ‘Ubayd, who was shot in both knees as he filmed himself with his back toward the border fence at a protest east of al-Breij Camp on 30 March. The video, published on social media, shows the moment he was shot. In the footage, he appears to be standing in an isolated area, far from the fence, and not seeming to pose any threat to the lives of Israeli soldiers. He is currently in need of a knee replacement operation to be able to walk again.”

After the Zionists cripple them, Palestinians return to the demonstrations in wheelchairs — and the Zionists shoot them dead. That’s what happened to Ibrahim Abu Thurayya, a double amputee (from a Zionist airstrike) who was shot dead in his wheelchair for the crime of peacefully protesting Trump’s delusional claim that Jerusalem al-Quds belongs to the Zionist entity.

Palestinians, even after what may be the worst century of oppression that any people on earth has ever suffered, will continue to resist Zionist genocide. But when will the Muslim Ummah, consisting of almost two billion people — more than enough to consign Zionism to the proverbial rubbish bin of history — finally rise up in their defense?

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