By Jeremy Salt

There is little that could be more uncivilized, cruel and barbarous than the crimes Israel is committing or more morally depraved than the complicity of the governments helping it along.

Take 1:

Washington DC: The airlift of machetes into Rwanda continued today despite the continued killing of Tutsi men, women and children by Hutu extremists. At the same time, tents and food aid are being flown in for the victims of violence following congressional approval of an emergency aid package.

The US defended what appeared to be contradictions in the administration’s ‘kill and feed’ policy.

“We have pointed out many times that the Hutu authorities have the right of self-defense,” a State Department source who declined to be named said. “We deeply regret that machetes provided for agricultural purposes are being used by some extremists for other purposes but we are not going to play the blame game. We will continue to provide food aid to the victims of violence on both sides.

“The Hutu leadership has apologized for the church massacre and has ordered an investigation into the apparent cause, a breakdown in the chain of command. We have advised restraint but for the moment the supply of machetes will continue, as we do not want to further destabilize the situation.”

Take 2:

Washington DC: As the death toll in Gaza rises, the airlift of arms into Israel continued today. At the same time, tents and food aid are being flown in following congressional and White House approval of an emergency aid package.

The US defended what appeared to be apparent contradictions in the administration’s ‘kill and feed’ policy. “We have pointed out many times that Israel has the right of self-defense,” said a State Department source, who declined to be named. “We deeply regret that civilians are dying but we do stress that the Palestinians would not be in this situation if they were not Palestinian. Beyond that, we are not going to play the blame game.

“While we have repeatedly urged restraint, the supply of precision-guided munitions, small bombs, bunker buster bombs, tank ammunition, F35A fighter jets, Hellfire missiles, 155mm cannon, night vision goggles, grenades, mortars, small arms and ammunition will continue, as we do not want to further destabilize the situation.”

The New York Times editors have advised their correspondents against the use of loaded expressions such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, occupied territory, refugee camps, Palestine and the nakba. Slaughter, massacre and carnage may be used but only when the terrorist attack of October 7 is being described.

Criticized for excluding what some critics described as “these important reference points,” a spokesperson for the editors said that “we are not going to play the blame game by emotive reporting of what is happening. We tell our readers what we think they need to know, not what our critics seem to think they need to know. End of story as far as we are concerned.”

Take 3:

London, May 1943: Szmul Zygielbojm, a Polish Jew living in London who had spent a year trying unsuccessfully to draw the attention of world governments to a Bundist report on the extermination of Jews in occupied Poland, issued his final statement before taking his own life.

“The responsibility for this crime of murdering the entire Jewish population of Poland falls in the first place on the perpetrators, but indirectly it weighs on the whole of humanity, the peoples and governments of the Allied States, which so far have made no effort toward a concrete action for the purposes of curtailing this crime,” he writes.

“By passive observation of this murder of defenceless millions and of the maltreatment of children, women and old men, these countries have become the criminals’ accomplices. I cannot be silent …. As I was unable to do anything during my life, perhaps by my death I shall contribute to destroying the indifference of those who are able and should act.”

Then he put down his pen, took sleeping pills and died.

Take 4:

Take 1 could be true if the Hutus were enmeshed in and vital to US strategic and corporate horrors. The White House, the State Department and the media would have found some way of holding the Tutsis at least partly responsible for their own fate. The Hutu leadership’s horror at the crimes committed by extremists would have been headlined over the latest casualty figures.

A full investigation was already underway, readers/viewers would be told, and justice would be served, the State Department spokesperson would have emphasized. In the meantime the supply of machetes would continue, with the repeated warning that in absolutely no circumstances were they to be used for any other purpose than cutting down maize and bananas.

Take 2 is largely true, down to the internal censorship of the NYT, and Take 3 is wholly true.

What would Szmul Zygielbojm say today had he lived through the genocide of the Jews only to witness a genocide in Gaza different in scale but not in essence and committed not against Jews but by them?

He would surely be horrified, as many Jews around the world are: this is not Judaism as they see it but its corruption in the form of the parasitic outgrowth that has hijacked its symbols and manipulated its history.

Aaron Bushnell killed himself in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington DC because of “what people have been experiencing at the hands of their colonizers” and because he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”

Zygielbojm and Bushnell stand beside each other and many others in history who have been driven to the breaking point in an amoral political world. The same indifference noted by Zygielbojm is the reality behind the mask of humanitarian concern worn by the heads of ‘western‘ governments and their ministers.

The people of the world are horrified, repulsed beyond measure, but they are not. These governments are literally watching Israel slaughter Palestinians, doing nothing to stop it and everything to encourage it by supplying the weapons needed to continue the genocide. They are handing the machetes to the Hutus.

Nothing shifts them, not the massacre of children, not the sniping murder of children, not the burying of children in rubble, not the destruction of hospitals and schools, not the denial of food and medical aid and other essentials of life, not death by deliberate starvation, not the bombing of Gaza’s Al Basma IVF clinic (4000 embryos destroyed), not the bombing of the dead in their cemeteries, not even quadcopters put to sadistic use by broadcasting the crying of children and the wailing of mothers to lure Palestinians into the streets so they can be killed.

In early April, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention found that Israel is committing genocide across Palestine, in the West Bank as well as Gaza, not a “plausible” genocide as the ICJ has ruled but an actual genocide but these heads of government and government ministers still have nothing to say.

No savage tribe has ever killed so many people so leisurely, so joyfully, so remorselessly so sadistically and cruelly as the uniformed men and women swarming across the Gaza they have destroyed.

They are not savages but the nice young woman with a pony tail who kills remotely with a drone before going to the gym to work out and the nice young man who never misses his grandmother’s birthday, cheering as his unit blows up a school or as he fires a missile into a block of flats from his F35A. The thought that he is probably killing other grandmothers must not occur to him.

The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary describes savage pertaining to people as primitive and uncivilised, and savagery as behaving in a cruel and barbarous manner.

There is little that could be more uncivilized, cruel and barbarous than the crimes Israel is committing or more morally depraved than the complicity of the governments helping it along, in the full knowledge of what they are doing.