Tag Archives: genocide

To be in this timeline

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This past week I realized something. It was after I saw a video of a father tenderly holding the severed head of his child. He gently caressed the boys hair as he sobbed. He was killed by an Israeli airstrike on the tents where this family was forced to live. Forced to live because their entire neighbourhood had been carpet bombed. I also saw a young girl on a stretcher, her head cracked opened by shrapnel to the point that part of her brain was seeping out. Another one showed a girl in agony, burned from head to toe from a different airstrike. There were no pain meds to soothe her. And no parents to comfort, as they had been killed in the blast.

Over the last 17 months my Instagram has become a parade of horror and death. Of mothers wailing, fathers unable to speak. Of children shot by snipers. Of starving babies and amputees who had to endure their pain without anesthesia. Of dogs ripping at corpses in the street. Needless to say, it has taken a toll.

I have been involved in human rights for many years. And I have stood in solidarity with Palestinians who have endured occupation and apartheid for 76+ years. I’ve seen a lot of terrible and gruesome things. But even I have not seen anything like what we have been witness to for the past 17 months.

A livestreamed genocide. Shown to us partly by the victims. but also by the perpetrators themselves. Men and women in uniform donning women’s lingerie or riding on children’s bicycles. Women and children who had been forced to flee their homes or who had been killed by those same men and women in uniform. Men and women in uniform making marriage proposals in front of devastated schools or ruined mosques or gleefully detonating bombs to level entire apartment blocks or universities.

We have been told that this is all justified. That it is the consequence for the crimes of October 7th. But they never talk about the decades preceding that day. About the occupation. About the blockade and siege. About the home demolitions. About the tens of thousands of civilians, including thousands of children, who have been locked up in Israeli gulags over the years without charge. About the settler violence or the army that protects them as they rampage. About the indiscriminate bombings on Gaza long before that day in October. About a cruel, violent and entrenched system of apartheid.

They only talk about the murder of 1200 Israelis and foreign nationals. A terrible crime. But it is as if the complete destruction of a people is commensurate with that crime. As if the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, mass starvation, sniper shooting children, dropping 2000 lb. bombs on tents and hospitals and bakeries and universities and schools is a rational response.

I came to realize the other day that I am a changed person. Bearing witness to such crimes inevitably changes you. It wounds the soul. I cannot go to sleep or wake up without hearing the cries of little Hind. The child who sat in a car with the dead bodies of her family around her. Who called emergency services on the phone to come and save her as she bled. Of her voice, trembling with fear. Of the kindness of the operator as she tried to calm her. Of the sound of the Israeli tank in front of her and the gunfire that silenced her cries forever, along with the lives of the paramedics who came to help her.

I realized that I will never be the same. But also that I wouldn’t want to be the same. Because I don’t want to be like the people who have defended this. I don’t want to be like the people who have twisted their faces in laughter at human misery. Or like those who have witnessed this, yet have chosen to remain silent. To normalize it all for the sake of civility or safety. Or out of fear of being falsely accused of bigotry.

At first, I admit I was gravely disappointed by so many. Even angry at times. After all, I am not special. I am far from being a saint or virtuous. But I often wonder how so many others cannot see what I see. And I think you have to forfeit a great piece of your humanity to turn your eyes from one of the greatest crimes of this century. You have to become something else. A shadow of a person. A hungry ghost that seeks comfort in empty platitudes, distractions and the trappings of our age, yet cannot be sated. An apparition mimicking human form. Going through the motions, but unable to feel the full depth of what it really means to be flesh and blood and bone.

I never wanted to see or hear what I have. To be in this timeline. To bear witness and to be unpopular for recording it. Many of us feel that way. But I would rather do that, than lose the part of me that makes living in this world bearable.

Kenn Orphan, March 2025

*Photo is of a child killed by an Israeli airstrike while celebrating in their Eid clothes. The strike targeted a tent camp of displaced people in Mawasi Khan Younis, southern Gaza.

Gal Gadot is Shocked

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Oh Gal, you were shocked? Honestly, how utterly disconnected are you from the reality of being a settler? How can you continue to claim ignorance about the Nakba? How can you continue to pretend you have no idea how this all started?

Here’s the deal, Gal. I know I am a settler. I am not indigenous to North America. I know that this one fact does not make me an evil person. It doesn’t mean that I do not belong here either. But I know that being a settler requires my attention and action to work toward justice. A justice that was violently robbed of the Indigenous people here. It caused generational trauma. And I have a responsibility to acknowledge that. To listen and to act in a way that heals and restores what was lost. It won’t erase the crimes committed against Indigenous people here, but it is literally the least I can do.

Gal, you served in the IDF even as it carried out heinous acts of oppression and cruelty against millions of people. You ignored the ongoing apartheid implemented by your government. You defended them even as they commit genocide. You even took a role in a movie that showed you saving children from a missile attack. Yet you defended Israel even after it slaughtered four boys with a missile on a beach in Gaza who were merely playing football.

Gal, do you know how many Palestinian children have been targeted and killed by the IDF? Before AND after the tragic events of October 7th over a year ago? There were terrible things committed on that day, but do you know that there were no “beheaded babies” on October the 7th? That that was a lie? Or that there have been many beheaded babies in Gaza from airstrikes over the last year+?

Have you heard of little Hind? How she sat in a car with her dead family for hours through the cold night? How she desperately called emergency services to save her? How she was terrified and badly injured? And how an Israeli tank killed her and the paramedics who came to help her?

And yet, after almost a year and a half of endless airstrikes, imposed starvation, complete destruction of hospitals, clinics, bakeries, water treatment facilities, shelters, apartment buildings, universities, you are shocked by a backlash to you claiming you are Indigenous to a land that is being mercilessly emptied of its actual Indigenous population?

Gal, the backlash you received was not hatred. It was disgust. It was rage. It was the reaction from people who have just seen videos of children limp or burned beyond recognition. Mothers wailing. Torn bodies upon the scorched earth. And yet you stand in this moment of historic weight and claim you are the real victim here?

You are wrong, Gal. We know. We have an idea of what is happening here. And we also realize you probably never will. 

Kenn Orphan, March 2025

Along with Bombs, Starvation and Torture, Israel is Burning Civilians to Death

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The young man on the right was Sha’ban Al Dalou. He is pictured here with his family and was a 19 year old software engineering student who spoke fluent English. He was trying to raise money to get his family evacuated from Northern Gaza to Egypt. But that never happened.

Israel murdered him along with his family this past weekend in the meager tent he had built for his family next to Al Aqsa hospital with a 2 ton American-made bomb. His last moments were captured of him in the flames on a cot with an IV still in his arm.

I will never forget that video. I will never forget the screams or the wailing. And even though I have seen a lot horror and brutality in my lifetime, I will never be the same after this one year.

Explain to me how this was self-defense. Explain to me how Western politicians can still call this a “humanitarian crisis” and not what it is: genocide. Explain how a year can go by, with thousands upon thousands of civilians dead, including thousands upon thousands of children. So many burned, blown up, shot by snipers in the head, buried under the rubble of their homes. So many starved. Suffocated. Deprived of life saving medical care, medications, anesthesia, polio vaccines. So many bakeries, shelters, universities, schools, hospitals, houses, churches, mosques flattened. Explain to me why I should care about election cycles, when almost all Western politicians either support this, applaud it, make excuses for it, or are silent. Explain why the US and Germany are still providing 99% of the bombs and armaments to Israel and how Canada, the UK, France, Australia and other Western countries provide other arms and support. Explain why most Western media still whitewashes it all, demonizes anyone who protests, and dehumanizes the victims.

If you can explain all of this you will succeed in explaining away whatever shred is left of your humanity.

Rest in peace, Sha’ban. The world failed you, your family and your people.

Kenn Orphan, October 2024

The most televised genocide in human history.

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As the world watches even more gruesome scenes from Gaza and prepares for a horror of unimaginable scale in the southern city of Rafah, it is instructive to recount what has happened so far. In November, Israel ordered over a million people to flee northern Gaza. This is a crime under international law called “forced displacement”. Gaza is walled in on all sides and the sea, which is also heavily guarded by Israeli drones and war ships. There is no escape from this concentration camp. The only place to flee to was southern Gaza. The city of Rafah.

As Israel leveled entire neighbourhoods in the north, including laying siege to the only hospital there, it then dropped bombs on Rafah at least 200 times killing scores of civilians. Gazans, including thousands of children, are now literally starving to death thanks to Israel’s restrictions, its unproven allegations against UNRWA and many ordinary Israelis who are blocking aid trucks from entering the enclave. Thousands are drinking tainted or salt water for lack of anything else. There are few medicines and no anesthetic. Thousands are dying of preventable disease.

This week Prime Minister Netanyahu tweeted his intention to lay siege to Rafah, ordering civilians to flee to safety. But where exactly is this place they are to flee to? Rafah was it. There are no other places for over 2 million people to go to. It is obvious that the coming siege will kill and maim thousands of people who have no where to go. Israeli soldiers have been tiktoking their war crimes gleefully every day. Does anyone really think they will have restraint?

The US, supported by a cadre of client and Western subservient states, are directly responsible for this unfolding genocide. The Western media is also culpable in its utterly shameful coverage (or lack thereof) of this crime against humanity.

The rest of us, people of conscience, can do nothing but raise our voices and watch in horror at the most televised genocide in human history.

Kenn Orphan, February 2024

The Power That Must Be Resisted

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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” – Ursula Le Guin

 

When the outright fascist Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidency in October, it wasn’t just the poor, people of colour, LGBTQ, or indigenous peoples that lost. Indeed, the earth’s weakened biosphere and imperiled climate lost even bigger. The president elect of the world’s 4th largest democracy has vowed to open up vast swaths of the iconic rainforest to multinational logging, cattle, mining and agricultural industries. With this one political victory the world’s ruling capitalist elite saw more dollar signs than in their wildest dreams, and the earth’s “lungs” were given a terminal prognosis.

Bolsonaro’s rise to power bears a strong resemblance to that of Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, Rodrigo Duterte and Viktor Orban. All of them have employed the techniques of classic fascism: demonizing political opponents and the media, rhetoric endorsing violence, stoking chauvinistic nationalism, scapegoating marginalized people. All them possess a disgruntled, demoralized, yet loyal base of supporters, and regularly connect with them through rallies that ridicule or bully those who dissent or disagree from their position. All of them manipulate information to spread confusion, false information or to obfuscate facts. But the most important thing these men share in common is their eagerness to wed corporate and state power, the hallmark of fascist governance. All of them sit atop treasure troves of “exploitable resources” and it is for this reason alone that they are lauded among the global capitalist elite.

Case in point, Bolsonaro received a lavish endorsement from the Wall Street Journal, the essential mouthpiece for the 1%. This should come as no surprise since their primary readership is the moneyed elite whose coffers only stand to burst with more spoils of the earth from this latest political disaster. But there are similar sentiments elsewhere. The financial newspaper Handelsblatt reported that German business leaders are “unfazed” by Bolsonaro’s election and are even “hopeful.”

Even the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a media outlet that is supposed to be public, had the gall to suggest that this victory might be just what the Canadian economy needs. Of course, this “Canadian economy” is comprised of the wealthy mining and logging sectors alone which have already devastated vast swaths of Central and South America. Indeed, there are scores of multinational companies that must be salivating over the prospect of legalized looting they will be allowed to do under a Bolsonaro government. And they understand that they will likely get a pass for inevitable disasters. Companies like BHP, the Anglo-Australian mining company that is responsible for a massive dam break on the Doce River in 2015 that killed at least 17 people, displaced thousands, and polluted the river and beaches along the Atlantic coast. It was one of biggest environmental disasters in Brazil’s history.

To the 1% Bolsonaro’s sexism, racism and homophobia are a non-issue. His pining for the days of military dictatorship, endorsement of torture, or the slaughter of political opponents aren’t of concern either. On the contrary, these are minor footnotes on their blood soaked ledgers. While they might prefer a more polished figurehead to give inclusive sounding speeches that preserve the status quo of global capitalism with a pleasing face, they are completely fine with an outright fascist at the helm too. Look at the corporate leaders who have met with and gushed over India’s Modi to get an idea how this works. Given this, why would the complete destruction of the Amazon rainforest give them pause? To them this region of astounding biodiversity is a treasure trove of capital investment and extraction.

The Amazon rainforest loses an area the size of Costa Rica every year due to deforestation from the palm oil, soy, logging and beef industries. Illegal extraction activities, too, have defiled river ways and assaulted indigenous peoples on their ancestral lands. Indeed, the neoliberal economic policies of prior governments and championed by the liberal status quo had not prevented the ongoing destruction of the region or protected indigenous peoples. In fact they aided corporations who sought profits over the planet or people. But Bolsonaro stands to step up the carnage and open indigenous lands and areas that are now protected from the incursions of big industry. This will amount to genocide against those who live there and ecocide against the living biosphere itself.

From the Athabasca to Standing Rock to the Niger Delta to the Amazon and beyond, the earth and its peoples are under attack. Those who are leading this assault are without conscience or rationality. They are apathetic to the existential crisis we face as a species because they sincerely believe they can buy their way to higher ground; and they are virtually untouchable by the rule of law which in most cases has been constructed to protect their interests. They are a supranational capitalist class whose power lies in the dictatorship of money. But while they wield great power, they are not all powerful.

As the late Ursula LeGuin reminded us, “any power can be resisted,” and this truth is no more urgent to understand and take hold of than at this moment in history. But resistance cannot come from the status quo establishment. After all, this is the same machine that produced fascists like Trump and Bolsonaro in the first place. Resistance must be radical and it must be global because, given the circumstances and our collective predicament, only a radical paradigm shift offers a chance of creating a different world than the dystopic one we are seeing unfold before us.

 

Kenn Orphan   November, 2018

Fanatics, Dogma and Disarray

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Recently, I had an interesting (see disturbing) back and forth with a self-described Stalinist who told me that if it were up to him I would be “sent to the gulag” for my “bourgeois brand of Trotseyist socialism.”  I had a hearty laugh at the time, but he wasn’t kidding.  Later I thought about the historic, real world implications of that comment.  After all, is a gulag any different than a concentration camp? And is it somehow okay or even funny to suggest sending a human being you dislike or disagree with to a warehouse of misery, torture and death?  Apparently, in the minds of many ideologues, it is.
This person represents a certain mindset.  Despite his protestations, when it came down to tactics and ultimate goals he bore very little discernible difference from a Nazi or a fascist.  In fact the course of our “discussion” took on the same tone.  Given the current social and political climate I do not think it is hyperbolic to be concerned by this attitude.   And the previous century is certainly a cautionary tale on the dangers inherent to purist ideas and “isms.”
Human history has been drenched in oceans of blood shed for the sake of purist dogma and buried under mountains of corpses for the supposed righteousness of an idea.  All manner of atrocities have been justified and, in many cases, celebrated for the sake of religious beliefs, “national security interests,” greed and material profit, to “protect” the public or society from a perceived menace, or for political ideologies which purport to be the answer to all our problems.
Being a human being in community, however, is a messy business.  It requires patience, a willingness to listen, and the arduous bridge building work of solidarity.  But the fervid ideologue cannot countenance such disarray, at least not for very long.  To them it is not about cooperation, movement building, or respecting the inherent worth of all human beings.  It is about achieving an end.  And, ultimately, about control and power.
We are entering a troubled age of rapidly dwindling resources, chaotic and catastrophic weather, and an imperiled biosphere coupled with seemingly perpetual militaristic aggression, corporate greed and a growing global police state.  Now more than ever we need radical ideas and a massive paradigm shift in the way we see the world and live in it.  But this makes the discomfort of fanatics even more troubling.  It isn’t simply these monumental challenges we all face or the change that is needed that bothers them, but the flawed, fragile and tangled nature of being human itself.  As a result they are often drawn toward despots and their savage solutions.
But a dire warning to all who encounter or who may be swayed by such zealots:  Be cautious of the utopia they promise.  Because it may very well be built upon a mass grave that will one day contain your bones.

Kenn Orphan  2017

 

Title painting is by Ukrainian artist Nikolai Getman who survived one of the USSR’s gulags thanks to his talent at illustration.

Beware, the Misanthrope

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There is, perhaps, no sadder or more dangerous a thing than when misanthropy overcomes the human heart.  It is a malady no less deadly than cancer, and when it is allowed to fester too long it claims the soul itself.  The body may follow but often not for many bitter sodden years.  It begins quite innocently with otherizing, but moves rapidly to full blown demonizing and dehumanization. Throughout the process it whittles away empathy for the suffering or plight of others and denudes a person of their capacity for solidarity with the oppressed.

Misanthropy is like a drug.  Seeing the world with all of its innumerable sufferings, the cruelty, personal failings, the destruction of the living earth by our species, and our dire, collective trajectory can create a deep anger toward our fellow human beings and a longing for separation from the pain. But instead of channeling that anger toward a greater love many succumb to the strong temptation to hatred of the other.  It enables an illusion of supremacy making it intoxicating, at least for a while.
Rohingya Refugees Source The GuardianThe ones who elevate it to an art form, or use it for entertainment, or employ it for success in politics or business or career, will often entice mobs or crowds of other misanthropes or the disaffected or alienated to follow them. Feeling quite empty themselves people are often drawn to the swoon of incendiary screeds, pitchforks and trials against a much needed scapegoat for everything that has gone wrong in the world.  It has the power to kill movements for justice, extinguish the desire for a more equitable or decent world, or even sweep entire societies into the maw of maniacal totalitarianism.

In truth, we all have misanthropic feelings or thoughts on any given day. We can and should look at what is happening and be realistic about our situation. We can and should criticize our actions and apathy. We can even come to accept, as I have, the possibility that the human species may not survive given our trajectory. But the hardcore misanthrope sees the suffering of the world and the failings of human beings and instead of choosing solidarity with them, they choose its opposite.

women-prisoners-at-auschwitz-1944-photo-source-the-holocaust-museum

In the dark days ahead humanity will likely see the rise of a myriad of misanthropes each vying for one last bit of attention. They will seize on the chaos of a biosphere in peril and the collapse of economies and empires. The despot and the tyrant will use this kind of hatred for their own ends; but far more insidious are the misanthropes within the masses; for they may decry hypocrisy and damn the powerful for their excesses, hubris or murderous legacy; but in an instant they will turn on their comrades, allies or followers.  To the hardcore misanthrope all disagreement or dissent from their worldview is cause for suspicion and scorn.  And this has the potential to turn to marginalization, banishment or even extermination.

Refugees waiting for hours to cross the border to Macedonia. Photo by Erik Marquardt.

Many of them will inflame emotions and suggest or encourage violence by innuendo or spreading scandals and falsehoods dressed up as truth.  And this has the tendency to pave the way for atrocities, pogroms and genocide.  Others will suck the oxygen out of dissent faster than any state crackdown could via invective, indifference or indignation at the struggles of ordinary people to make a difference in the world around them.  Some will tap into base passions and bigotries, others will dress up their contempt in pseudo-intellectualism, and will insert doubt, derision and ridicule into discourse in order to demoralize and dampen the spirit of resistance.  A few are looked at as leaders of a movement even while they crush the soul of it under their heel.  And much of this is done without them being even barely conscious of their motives or impact.   Make no mistake, though, the seasoned misanthrope garnishes a similar pleasure from inflicting misery or doling out abuse as the sadist.  All of them are menacing specters to our species and are to be pitied.

But beware.  If we countenance their cynicism for too long we will most assuredly court our own doom.

Kenn Orphan 2017

Justice is a Verb

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Children at a Nazi concentration camp. Source National Holocaust Museum.It has always been easy for the powerful and the general public to look back at crimes against humanity in the deep closet of history and feel appalled.  It is easy for politicians to stand before eternal flames bemoaning the Slave Trade or the Holocaust. and feel solidarity and compassion for the victims of some long ago mass murder.  What still eludes most of society, though, is the application of that same outrage for similar crimes being perpetrated right at this moment.

President George W. Bush visiting the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. Getty Images.There is a simple reason for the elite’s willful ignorance toward today’s atrocities.  Apathy is a celebrated virtue among the wealthy; and many, if not most, benefit richly from each and every occupation, oppression and act of ethnic cleansing.  In many cases they are even perpetrating these crimes with the use of mercenary armies, proxy states and client dictators.

For the general public it is a bit more nuanced, but not much.  In the West we have been meticulously trained to avert our eyes to current injustices. Distraction in the form of vapid entertainment is ubiquitous, selective outrage is a staple of the mainstream media, and nationalistic hypocrisy is exonerated and sponged from the record every day.

United Nations News Centre - UN unveils permanent memorial to victims of transatlantic slave tradeToday’s oppressed are no different than yesterday’s. They are just as reviled by the powerful, misrepresented by the press, and ignored by society at large. But their plight is no less worthy of justice.  Their suffering does not pack theaters or hackneyed film festivals in Colorado with tear-jerking cinematography and musical scores.  And they have no memorials in Washington on which to lay wreaths.

Instead they themselves pack sinking ships in the Mediterranean and Andaman Seas, or open air prisons and Bantustans in Gaza or the West Bank, or atop lumbering trains heading north in Mexico. They grope desperately in the dark for survival on the margins of empire.

Rohingya refugees stranded on the Andaman Sea. Photo, Christophe Archambault, Getty Images.

8 year old Palestinian boy, Mohammed Ali, arrested at Qalandiya checkpoint by Israeli border police. Photo, Middle-east Monitor.

JUCHITAN, MEXICO - AUGUST 06: Central American immigrants ride north on top of a freight train on August 6, 2013 near Juchitan, Mexico. Thousands of Central American migrants ride the trains, known as 'la bestia', or the beast, during their long and perilous journey through Mexico to reach the U.S. border. Some of the immigrants are robbed and assaulted by gangs who control the train tops, while others fall asleep and tumble down, losing limbs or perishing under the wheels of the trains. Only a fraction of the immigrants who start the journey in Central America will traverse Mexico completely unscathed - and all this before illegally entering the United States and facing the considerable U.S. border security apparatus designed to track, detain and deport them. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)

Our solidarity with them should not wait for some Hollywood production after all the graves have been dug.  And we should never take our cue from the powerful as to when it is appropriate to speak out.  Justice is not the dusty, bronze scales that adorn the mantelpieces of the elite.  It is not a trophy.  It is a verb that refuses to rest; and it is always on the side of the oppressed in what ever page of history they may inhabit.

Kenn Orphan 2015

To Save an Entire World

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Marc Chagall PassoverIt is Passover, the Jewish holiday celebrating freedom from slavery. The details of the story or its historicity are not important because all cultures have myths that provide foundational meaning; and rituals provide us an opportunity for the tradition of storytelling as well as reflection. Arguably it is this myth that has been the most influential in Judaism, which has a long and rich history of ethics and social justice. Two thousand years ago the great teacher Hillel said “whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” Bearing centuries of pogroms and persecution which led to the ultimate horror of the Holocaust, Jews have maintained a cultural identity that defied the odds. This heritage is rooted in liberation and justice. So it is painful for many Jews of conscience to see how the Israeli regime has sullied much of that past with the stain of apartheid, racism and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.

The Zionist experiment may have been born of the injustice of antisemitism in Europe; but it ended in reflecting the cruelest and most brutal forms of European colonialism. Theodor Herzl (1860 – 1904), one of the founders of Zionism, said: “We shall have to spirit the penniless population across the border … while denying it any employment in our country.”  David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, stated: “We must do everything to insure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget.”  And in 1983 Raphael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces explained: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”

But as Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish said so eloquently:

“The Palestinians’ understanding of this war is embodied in their exposure to a massive uprooting. It is embodied in their being transformed into refugees within their own homeland and beyond it. It is embodied in the attempt to expel them from being, from space, from time, after the usurpation of their homes and their histories, after their transformation from an honest entity in time and place to a ghostly surplus to requirements, exiles from being.

But the makers of the nakba, of the catastrophe, failed to break the will of the Palestinian people and to eradicate their national identity, through diasporisation, through massacre, through pretending that the mirage was a reality, through the production of a counterfeit history. In the past five decades they have failed to push us into absenting ourselves or to cast us into a state of amnesic dementia.”

Today this experiment is on shaky ground and it has created a country that lives in a state of constant paranoia and aggressive nationalism. Many Jews around the world and within Israel have and continue to fight against the injustice this ideology has wrought in the struggle for equal rights for all residents of the region and not just one privileged ethnic group. They understand that if any nation wishes to be considered a democracy it cannot persist in decades long systemic discrimination and military occupation. Israelis Watch the Bombing of Gaza in Sderot Andrew Burton Getty Images Occupation generally leads to social hatred, distrust and antipathy towards the other. In Israel this was no more clear than when Israelis gathered on a hilltop outside the town of Sderot to watch the destruction of Gaza this past summer. Many were left scratching their heads at such callous disregard for an entire population with no where to run. It is true that residents of Sderot have had to deal with terrifying random rockets, but the disproportionate response by Israel was surreal and horrifying. Over 2100 residents were killed, over 500 of them children, and tens of thousands left homeless by a bombing campaign that leveled entire neighborhoods. Hundreds of thousands were left scarred, both physically and psychologically. Hospitals, schools and UN shelters were bombed. Boys were killed playing football on the beach, sports fans were killed in a cafe watching the World Cup on t.v., and whole families were wiped out in the blink of an eye. A woman holds the body of her daughter, who medics said died on Friday from injuries sustained in an Israeli air strike on Thursday afternoon, at her funeral in Rafah Khuzaa Gaza ruins Sderot itself is an example of one town out of hundreds that was cleansed of its Palestinian residents in 1948 in what is referred to as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Scores of Palestinians were made refugees in the Gaza Strip straining the resources of the existing residents. Everyday they look at the homes that were once theirs.  Today Gaza is blockaded on all sides by Israel and Egypt. Food, construction materials and medicine are heavily restricted. The water treatment plants, already in dire shape, were decimated by Israeli bombing leaving nearly 90% of the water contaminated and undrinkable. Fishermen are routinely fired on if they stray outside the boundary of a few nautical miles. The UN estimates that Gaza will be unlivable by 2020. In the occupied West Bank Jewish settlers, under the protection of the Israel Defense Force (IDF), routinely hack down or burn Palestinian olive trees, destroy their wells and harass village residents. The city of Hebron is segregated and Palestinian businesses and homes have been walled up by the IDF. The wall of separation has divided towns and prevented farmers access to their fields. And Palestinian houses are demolished leaving whole families homeless. Israeli and Palestinian Women Protest the Seperation Wall at Bilin Image Courtesy of Gush Shalom This kind of sustained injustice and dehumanization infects both the victims and their victimizers. And its persistence creates a broken people, unable to face the cancer of their hate and entrenched in paranoia. But over the years, despite it being an uphill battle, Jews and Palestinians have come together to fight the occupation.  Jewish ethics have informed environmental and social justice movements around the world, from the Civil Rights movement in the United States to the fight against apartheid in South Africa. But like many other traditions it has been co-opted by those only interested in war mongering, sowing fear and maintaining power. Reclaiming it is essential because if there is anything that should be communicated this Passover it would be the message of liberation from oppression. It is a moral imperative that is rooted deeply in the human psyche, and it is one that belongs to all people who seek justice for the oppressed.

Kenn Orphan  2015

The Easiest Job on the Planet

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Leaders gather in Paris photo Associated Press

It is difficult to muster any feeling other than nausea when looking at this photo of war criminals. Linked arm in arm, this junta marched boldly through the streets of Paris today, proclaiming their steadfast commitment to freedom of speech in the wake of the tragic attacks that left 12 dead at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo, and resulted in 5 more in the ensuing manhunt. The nausea comes when any person of conscience shirks the corporate media’s imposed amnesia and remembers the mountains of corpses amassed by each of them, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Pakistan to Yemen to Gaza to Libya and beyond. It also comes when one remembers the horrendous abuses and assaults on freedom of expression in the form of crackdowns on protestors and prison sentences for journalists in their own countries. This display was, of course, for one reason alone. It signals a new page in an unending war of imperialistic aggression, dressed up in the sanctimonious garments of western superiority.

Unlike most of the protestors who joined the march today, freedom of speech is meaningless to this gang of miscreants. But it is a useful phrase to employ when stoking the flames of social and racial hatred. Anti-immigrant fervor is already reaching fever pitch in much of Europe where austerity measures, imposed on the population by the very ones gathered today in Paris, have resulted in misery for millions. This spectacle provides a convenient distraction from their outright plunder and malfeasance. It gives them an exit from the ramifications of their murderous and cruel policies. And with a subservient press in tow, the same one that virtually ignored every other mass protest against their tyranny, their job has become the easiest one on the planet.

Kenn Orphan  2015