Licensed to Kill

The death-toll in Gaza is now - what - 800 and rising? - as Israeli's genocidal onslaught (which is also their their peculiar form of electoral campaigning) continues. The victims include 13 members of the same family after their house came under tank fire. They include those killed in the two schools which were targetted by the Israelis after they had been given their GPS co-ordinates by UN officials who identified the schools as refugee centres. (UN officials were in control of the schools and deny the presence of Hamas fighters). Why did the Israelis target the schools? Because they are deliberately targetting civilians. Consider this: how many Israeli soldiers have been killed in the last few weeks (excluding "friendly fire" incidents) and how many Palestinian children (the figures are less than ten compared to several hundred). The children of the colonised are at far greater risk than the "soldiers" of the occupying colonial power. Israeli is, as Avi Shlaim argued in G2 (7/1/09) a "rogue state" which "habitually violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction, and practices terrorism - the use of violence against civilians for political purposes". And, as we can see in the picture above showing Israeli settlers apparently jubilantly watching Gaza bombed and children killed, they think murder is a form of entertainment. But then Israeli is always held, by the western powers, to a different and lesser standard of morality than anyone else on the planet. Robert Fisk quotes Fintan O'Toole in The Irish Times: "At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?"