Brutal Silence of Western and Arab Governments on carnage in Gaza

"This article is reflective of the rising sentiment in the Pakistani people that Muslim world must help itself. Waiting for the UN, EU or the U.S help in stopping Israeli occupation of Palestine and slaughter in Gaza is useless."

- Les Blough, Editor

January 11, 2008 - While the carnage continues in Gaza, rest of the world is busy with other problems and lot of the world governments simple don’t care about the genocide in Gaza. The main culprits are U.S, British and the Muslim World Governments. Israeli writer, author and former professor of Haifa University Ilan Pappe, sums it up eloquently,

“I know that even the killing of hundreds of innocent Palestinians would not be enough to produce such a shift in the Western public opinion; it is even more unlikely that the crimes committed in Gaza would move the European governments to change their policy towards Palestine. It seems that even the most horrendous crimes, such as the genocide in Gaza, are treated as discrete events, unconnected to anything that happened in the past and not associated with any ideology or system. In this new year, we have to try to realign the public opinion to the history of Palestine and to the evils of the Zionist ideology as the best means of both explaining genocidal operations such as the current one in Gaza and as a way of pre-empting worse things to come.”

New U.S President-elect, Obama, during his visit to Israel in July 2008 said,

“If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters [Malia, 10 and Sasha, 7] sleep at night, I’m going to do everything in my power to stop that. I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.”

The Israelis are doing exactly what the U.S has done to perfection over the last half a century, and that is massive civilian killings in different parts of the world. A few million in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, a few hundred thousand in Iraq and Afghanistan and many more countries also appear on the long list of victims of U.S hegemony. Israel is merely doing what it has been doing for the past few decades and that is a ‘Holocaust’ of Palestinian people. According to Axis of Logic columnist, Gali Hassan,

“On Saturday 27 December 2008, U.S.-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes, Apache attack helicopters and artilleries unleashed premeditated and indiscriminate genocidal attacks on the densely populated and Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip. The aggression includes ground invasion, aerial and naval bombardment of the besieged Gaza using banned weapons such as cluster bombs, napalm-like white phosphorus bombs and new very high explosive weapons known as Dense Inert Metal Explosive (DIME), which cuts its victims to pieces and causes cancer in survivors”.

Gideon Levy of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, writes

“Speaking to reporters on the steps of the Elise Palace in Paris, Tzipi Livni, Israel’s pathological liar, publicly declared that Israel intention is the total destruction of Gaza. Contradicting all the evidence of a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Livni declared: 'There is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza'."

Bombing Children in Schools

Around 900 Palestinians have been killed so far, a lot of them are children (about 37% according to Axis of Logic correspondent, Hiyam Noir in Gaza) and over 3000 have been injured so far. It is outrageous that President Obama can’t utter a single word from his mouth against brutal killing of at least 30 school children who were taking shelter in U.N school compound or the other hundreds of Palestinian children killed. Can you imagine the response of the U.S if some Muslim country bombed and killed U.S children? We can all imagine the consequences for that country.

Why would Israel target and drop bombs at a U.N school? Oh, maybe the intelligence was faulty. Just like when in 2006 U.S drone attack at Chingai village area of Bajaur tribal area of Pakistan resulted in 80 students being killed. What looked like a terrorist training camp to U.S intelligence experts and drone handlers was nothing more than a poverty bitten mud shackled rural school for children, who are only able to get basic Islamic education because of lack of main stream schools.

How did the U.S learn to go on a rampage of violence against weak oppositions? From the British, their previous occupiers or rulers, as the British call their status in continental United States. To expect that the U.S, Britain or Israel will stop this military adventurist mindset is naive to say the least. To think that the U.N would be able to stop Israel from killing civilians in Gaza is definitely living in fool’s paradise. Yes the U.N can allow tough sanctions against Muslim countries like it did against Iraq after the first Gulf War, during which at least 500,000 Iraqi children died. How many times did you watch that on CNN or Fox News? We should all recall the response of Madeline Albright who was U.S ambassador to the U.N at that time; she said in an interview in May 1996, that “we think that the price is worth it”. In order words, she meant that it’s ok if half million Iraqi children are dying as a direct result of U.N sanctions.

World Leaders:

All this is just one side of the spectrum. The other side is equally ugly - that is the silence of the Muslim world leaders specially the Arab world. The harsh reality is that every single country in the Arab world and most of the Muslim world has either a corrupt King or a brutal dictator as a leader who enjoys awesome rapport with the U.S.

Hosni Mubarak:

If there is ever a World award for the most obedient servant of the U.S it will definitely go to Hosni Mubarak the President of Egypt, the Grand puppet of all the American puppets in the Muslim World. He has been Egyptian president since 1981. How many times has the U.S asked Egypt for fair elections? U.S can’t afford to ask Egypt or other Muslim world to hold free and fair elections. The reason is because of its failed foreign policy. It has radicalized the people of the Muslim world to such an extent that any independent government would ask the U.S to remove its bases from its soil followed by other such demands which are not in the interest of the U.S hegemonic interests.

Egypt proved its loyalty again to the U.S and Israel by closing down Rafah border crossing and warning Iran not to interfere into Palestine issue since it was an Arab issue and not for non-Arabs to interfere. Since when did killing of Muslims become an Arab issue? This is against the very fundamental teachings of Islam which sees men in general and Muslims in particular all part of a big brotherhood or a fraternity. Who is Egypt fooling? Palestine is the area that has Jerusalem, which is the third holiest city of Islam and cherished by all Muslims throughout the world. The Palestine issue is the biggest issue for the entire Muslim world.

Arab Leaders:

Most of the Arab world from U.A.E to Saudi Arabia are least bothered with this massacre for they are too busy bathing in their abundant oil wealth. They are too busy watching live coverage of Gulf Cup football tournament. It’s the most happening thing at the moment in the Gulf region and you have to be nuts to miss it. This is not the lowest ebb to which the Arab world governments have fallen I am sure the pit will become deeper to accommodate more depth for the falling pride of Arab world leaders.

President Hugo Chavez: They could all learn something from Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan president who sent Israeli Ambassador packing back to Tel Aviv due to their ungodly slaughter in Gaza.

Muslim Leaders:

Sadly, there is nothing much at the moment that other Muslim countries can do for Palestine. The Muslim world’s 80 percent population is non-Arab. The bigger and more powerful Muslim countries are Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, and the most populated of all, Indonesia. These countries are the ones that must take on the role of Veto power states amongst the Muslim world. There exists an organization in the Muslim world which has been sidelined by the Arab world; it is Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC). The Arabs roam around in their own Arab League, and Gulf Cooperation Council, two utterly useless organizations that have not been able to solve any problems of the Arab world. The five mentioned countries need to get together revamp the OIC, take control of the OIC, and affairs of the Muslim world particularly the Arab World. In the past Egypt was kicked out and sidelined by the rest of the Muslim world because of its strong pro-U.S ties. The need of the hour is to revitalize OIC and restore some pride and sense of political direction into the Arab world.

The Need of the Hour

It’s a tough task for these countries to join hands and lead the Muslim world. But it is the need of the hour we can’t simple keep sitting and waiting for the U.N or EU to come to rescue us from Israel or whoever else the aggressor is. The lesson for the Arab world is that eventually they will run out of oil but even before that they will end up squandering their petro dollars. Hatred is equally distributed against the U.S foreign policy and the corrupt rulers of the Muslim world.

How long will the despot rulers of the Muslim world keep their Yankee governments alive? Only time will tell but the actions of U.S and Israel is radicalizing the populations of Muslim world. This should be alarming for the people of Europe and U.S and they must demand from their governments change in their policies towards the Muslims world. They must demand people to people contacts between the policy makers and the local populations. A U.S think tank expert who has never visited the Muslim world, who doesn’t know the ground realities, dictating policy to a puppet leader of a Muslim world, is only messing things up so badly that eventually it will be too late to fix them.

Conclusion: Bush and Obama

It is too early to suggest if President Obama will continue following the same policy that Bush was following. Bush's policy of rampage wars, mass murdering of civilians in the Muslim world came up with useful, mischievous words like ‘crusades’, ‘war on terror’, Islamo-fascist’, ‘axis of evil’, and ‘they hate our democracy’. In being a war president, as Bush used to call himself after 9/11, Bush jolted the U.S economy and that of the rest of the world. Obama now has a choice, either to let go of this legacy and build new bridges with the Muslim world or he can out flank Bush’s legacy and come up with better words for Muslim world, while sinking the U.S economy even further, making certain CEO’s of U.S military-industrial complex richer and making the Middle East more bloodier than it already is. The choice is his but the ripples will be felt all over the world.

- By Talha Mujaddidi in Pakistan. Axis of Logic.

Talha Mujaddidi is a writer/analyst and Axis of Logic correspondent, living in Pakistan.

Talha is a writer from Pakistan, Talha is wireless communication engineer by profession. Has studied, lived and worked in USA. Talha follows current affairs and history of Middle East and Pakistan.