Thank you Chris for your courage to speak the truth and reveal the horrific crimes perpetrated by the Israeli government and military. Also, for your condemnation of america for it's war crimes and support of Israel. When will justice and democracy be returned to America. When will Bush and Cheney and now, Obama and their minions of criminals be brought to justice? America has fallen to the depths of moral and spiritual depravity!

Thank you for bringing common sense to this plain and sad subject which, as you suggest, is so distorted by the hyperbole and propaganda of what is wrongly called "war", but is in actual fact genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Thank you, thank you! Now all we can hope for is that some out there are not totally blind or deaf to the truth and logic. At least it has been for this once said clearly and well, as clearly as a bell tolls in a cold winter's night.

While world leaders and the mainstream media turn a blind eye to the ongoing misery in Gaza, internationals with compassion and of conscience have converged in Cairo motivated by love and in the pursuit of justice.

Gratitude maybe the highest expression of love, but it just maybe the sacrificial love in action being expressed by the thoughtful, committed activists who have converged in Cairo that could light the fire for real change and be the good to come out from the misery in Gaza.

Hundreds of activists who had already traveled on their dime and given up their time to bring some much needed humanitarian aid to the innocents in Gaza and to participate in the Gaza Freedom March have now also given up food.

Because the Egyptian government has denied over 1,300 nonviolent international activists entry into Gaza, hundreds of them began a hunger strike on December 28, 2009. Among them is Heddy Epstein, an 85-year-old Holocaust survivor who is part of a delegation of participants from 43 countries who committed to nonviolent march from northern Gaza to the Erez checkpoint in Israel on this New Year’s Eve to demand an end to the siege on the Gaza Strip.

In 1939, when Heddy Epstein was 14, her parents sent her to England, but they perished in Auschwitz in 1942. After World War II, Epstein worked as a research analyst at the Nuremberg Trials of Nazi doctors who performed medical experiments on concentration camp inmates. After moving to America, Epstein became an activist for peace and social justice causes. She said, "It is important to let the besieged Gazan people know they are not alone. I want to tell the people I meet in Gaza that I am a representative of many people in my city and in other places in the US who are outraged at what the US, Israeli and European governments are doing to the Palestinians and that our numbers are growing.”

Among those growing numbers are people of many and deep faith, atheists and agnostics who have united to do something about the misery endured by the innocent in Gaza.

The Gaza Strip has been under an illegal siege ever since Israel closed all of Gaza's borders in June 2007, and trapped 1.5 million civilians; half of them children under 17 years old.

The United States directly supported Israel’s deadly assault on the Gaza Strip for Israel used weapons paid for and supplied by the United States during “Operation Cast Lead.”

U.S. F- 16s, hellfire missiles, and ammunition used by the Israeli military devastated the Gaza Strip for 22 days and U.S.A. corporations also directly profited from “Operation Cast Lead.”

Caterpillar and Motorola equipment were used by the Israeli military during its assault on the occupied Gaza Strip. American made Caterpillar bulldozers demolished the civilian infrastructure throughout the Gaza Strip.

Amnesty International and the U.N. Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict/The Goldstone Report documented that Motorola components were also used in the bombs that Israel dropped. Human Rights Watch reported that shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers were found at the site of bombed civilian infrastructures in Gaza City.

The Goldstone Report thoroughly researched accounts of crimes committed by both Israel and Hamas during “Operation Cast Lead.”

There will never be peace without justice and justice requires that Israel and Hamas both need to be held accountable for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity.

Humanity is the quality of being human and also humane.

Humane feelings, dispositions, and sympathies are proven when humans do something to help relieve any in distress.

Humanity is expressed in kindness and tenderness and both are the fruits birthed in love.

Dorothy Day, a 20th century Christian anarchist, agitator of church, state and media said, "Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing.”

“Love is patient, love is kind. Love is not proud. Love is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with THE TRUTH! It always protects, it always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres. Love never fails.” 1 Corinthians 13

What a wonderful world it would be, if we all loved 'the other' as we love our self, family and friends.

What a beautiful world it could be when we all "Let our Conscience Be our Guide"- Jiminy Cricket

Learn More:

http://www.gazafreedommarch.org/

Please send an email to Egypt to let the Freedom Marchers enter Gaza and stop construction of another Separation Wall:

http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/301/t/9047/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1957

Eileen Fleming,
Founder of WeAreWideAwake.org
A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com
Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"

The title to the video says that Hedges gave this talk on "January 13, 2008." Are U sure this wasn't January 13, 2009, after Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza?

I was gratified to hear Hedges use the term, "genocide" which might be defined as mass murder rationalized by virulent racism. This Islamophobic racism must be stripped away to define these crimes as intolerable by the U.S. public. We must track, monitor and challenge the arrogant, hateful, Jewish supremacist racism of colonial Zionism in both Israel and the U.S.

A racist stealth attack is currently waged by "Progressive Zionism" (e.g., J-Street, Tikkun) which promotes the endless, so-called "peace process" (i.e., for peace and quiet) while proposing a "2-state solution" that is a solution not for the needs and rights of Palestinians but for Israel's self-perceived "demographic threat" and the moral and financial burdens of its occupation and blockade. As MLK said, "The Negro's greatest stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order' than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice." Israel carefully avoids the "E" word - equality - applied to the proposed states or the Jewish and Arab populations within Israel.

Like all people everywhere, Palestinians want more than peace and quiet or peace at any price. They want nothing less than freedom, equality and justice, have remained steadfast in their determination, and will settle for nothing less including restitution for suffering. Only a single, unified state with constitutional equality for all irrespective of religion or ethnicity can satisfy the criteria of freedom, justice and equality for all Palestinians - the refugees, those under occupation, the dispossessed foreign diaspora, and those living under draconian legal discrimination within Israel. This would also transform Israel from an international pariah into a normal country.

As MLK also observed, "Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." They demand it but are incapable on their own of forcing it, and desperately need our help. Israel, like Mississippi, can learn to live with equality once forced by outside power to do so. Political power and international judicial sanctions against Israel are blocked by U.S. vetoes in the UN Security Council. It is therefore up to international civil society to apply boycott and divestment strategies that proved successful against South Africa (See www.bdsmovement.net,www.pacbi.org, www.ijsn.net, www.endtheoccupation.org.).

I share Hedges' obvious fury and am deeply frustrated that it is so rare. How can people simply ignore these horrors or intellectualize them away?

In his recent book on the assassination of JFK by our own government, "JFK and the Unspeakable," Jim Douglass invokes our dread of facing "unspeakable" evil as an explanation, a theme explored by Trappist monk and author Thomas Merton.

Raised on a lifelong diet of cultural narcissism, inane sitcoms, celebrity gossip, and horror only as fantasy fiction, the recognition of our own country as an instrument of real, unspeakable evil is also unthinkable to almost all Americans. Was it also so for the 1930s-40s Germans, and must it not also be so for the Israelis today? It is otherwise difficult to explain the virtually psychotic level of denial and bizarre rationalizations put forward by Israel, its U.S. lobby, hasbara defense strategies, Stand with Us and other defenders of the indefensible - including the U.S. House of Representatives.

In describing the abject cowardice of our so-called leaders, Hedges failed to cite the role of the Israel lobby and network at intimidating politicians, controlling the media, and remorselessly attacking any critic of Israel by any means available, however base. Any politician opposing Israel can expect barrels of AIPAC-directed money poured into his next opponent's campaign.

Short of universal backbone injections in our nation's capital, the only remedies I see are (1) public campaign financing, (2) increasing public awareness and outrage to a level where honoring principles is less costly politically than ignoring them, and (3) sanctioning Israel by international civil society through boycotts and divestment (see www.bdsmovement.net and www.pacbi.org).

Israeli NGO (www.icahd.org) director Jeff Halper, circulating recently on the Hill to encourage congresspeople not to repudiate the Goldstone Report, was advised to avoid the words "justice" and "human rights" since these are irrelevant to U.S. foreign policy.

In the face of such appalling policy, I think it's time to return to Tom Jefferson's vision of human entitlement to life (e.g., not being killed by U.S., NATO or Israeli bombs), liberty (e.g., not being occupied by U.S., NATO or Israeli troops) and the opportunity for self-development and self-fulfillment ("pursuit of happiness," e.g., not having one's economic, educational, cultural, and governmental institutions, societal infrastructure, and loved ones destroyed by U.S., NATO or Israeli high-tech weaponry).

Tom was talking about all people, not just Americans. We vastly outnumber the imperial rulers of our lands, so it seems we should be able to rise up and take the reins away from the psychopaths if we are unwilling to be conned, manipulated, intimidated or corrupted out of doing so. But first we must take a step required in all 12-step programs, to commit our nation to a "fearless moral inventory" and confront the reality of our unspeakable evil.