The Untermensch Syndrome

The Untermensch Syndrome: Israel's Moral Decay
By Manuel Valenzuela
http://valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com/2006/07/untermensch-syndrome-isr\
aels-moral.html>

The labeling as anti-Semitic of anyone critical of the state of
Israel's policies in the continued destruction of Palestinian
identity, and now Lebanese society and infrastructure, and the
increasing domination into American foreign policy no longer has the
sting of threat or intimidation it once mastered. For too long this
masquerade has been used to silence those opposing anything Israel,
shouted at anyone disseminating truth and seeking justice. Like the
boy who cried wolf, this charade has lost its power or hypnotic
control, and today only serves to breed more anger and resentment
against the apologists and smear mongers protecting the cancerous
tentacles of Zionism and the crimes against humanity it spawns.

A once powerful marketing tool used to sequester valid criticism and
deny truth to millions has been eroded thanks to its overlords'
continued over abuse and labeling of the term 'anti-Semite' to anyone
even remotely critical of anything associated with Israel and the
tentacles of Zionism. To criticize Christianity does not make one
anti-Christian. To criticize Islam does not make one anti-Muslim or
anti-Arab, just as uncovering truths about the Bush administration
does not make one anti-American or unpatriotic. To speak truth about
any government in the world does not make us racist or xenophobic to
the people of that nation. Why then should criticism of Israeli and/or
Sharon's policies subject us to false labeling and acts of
intimidation whose only purpose is to silence truth into submission
and hijacking justice from ever emerging and being served?

The time has come to stop bending over to the dictates of intimidation
and scare tactics used by Israel's protectors, defenders and
apologists. The time has come to say "Never Again" to such fictional
libel and slander whose only purpose is the continued subjugation of
truth and awakening. The labeling of "anti-Semite" does not bother us,
nor does it stop us from writing truth to justice and reality to
intimidation because we refuse to be frightened into submission and
silenced into acquiescence by a mechanism we know to be false.

Our convictions, search for truth and want for justice supercedes the
trash invented to protect the malfeasance ruining humanity and the
crimes perpetrated against our fellow human beings. The time has come
to stand up and be heard, refusing to believe the smears and the
labels, instead living life in truth, devoid of veiled threats and
intimidation tactics whose power over us continues to erode thanks to
its incessant overuse and abuse. So smear if you must, defenders,
appeasers and apologists of human wickedness, continue to blindly
believe in the majesty of a fiction you know to be false, ensuring
your daily complicity in the crimes against humanity being committed
by those you protect and defend.

We are above your labels, above your intimidation and smear tactics,
following the path of truth in the voice of our writings and in the
convictions of humanity. If pursuing truth, fighting criminality and
awakening justice makes us anti-Semites, then guilty we are. If seeing
the dehumanization, exploitation and utter destruction of the
Palestinian people makes the voices of reason anti-Semitic, then
guilty we stand. To defend the humanity of other Semitic people is to
defend humanity itself. To speak out against injustice and
dehumanization makes us human, to defend it makes you complicit.

An Unbearable Likeness of Being

Here we are, living in the first decade of the 21st century, and still
the violent animal in the human condition exists, thriving inside our
carnal passions and still primitive mammalian brains, oozing out of
humanity to release the demons of evil that only homo sapiens are
capable of wielding.

Persisting in our primate selves as it has for millions of years, the
greatest symptom of our disease remains uncontrolled, dominating the
far reaches of man's Earth, turning barren once fertile soil and
forever despoiling the utter beauty our civilization possesses. Man
killing man, erupting violence upon our fellow humans, destroying what
our own hands create, decimating energy and beauty, life and
opportunity, this is the story of what our species has become. Through
tribal affiliation and identity, which the nation state now is, (a
tribe on steroids) the potency of violence and ill-treatment against
others seen as different or alien is manifested.

The human condition dictates that auras of superiority appear with
every tribe. What is nationalism today but a belief that our tribe is
the best in the world, that the group of humans we are attached to in
unity, be it of ethnic, racial, religious or regional (nation state)
parameters, is the preeminent assembly of all humanity? Beliefs of
supremacy of one's tribe and inferiority of others have marked man
from the very first cluster of family clans. In order to achieve this
most human psychological need, other subgroups have to be considered
lower in stature, considered third-world, savages, barbarians and
lesser humans, while others must be conquered and subjugated.

In the minds of those groups seeking to invade, conquer, pilfer and
exploit, the invaded and conquered must be seen as sub-human,
creatures not worthy of protection or life. The human mind, in order
to justify the ruthlessness it will inflict on less able peoples,
creates the impression that those now controlled are sub-humans and
therefore not immune to the restrictions of human morality. Sub-humans
are not humans, after all, and can be treated like animals or worse,
like dirt.

The Nazi ideology of placing its Aryan blood above all others,
believing its Germanic peoples the pinnacle of civilization, reflects
a perverted mass psychosis brought on by a malevolent leader and a
hypnotized tribe - namely Germany. In the delusional world of the
Nazis, Jews, Gypsies and Slavs were considered inferior. These peoples
were labeled 'untermensch,' the German word for sub-human. As such,
labels became reality and reality became a holocaust, resulting in
millions of deaths and untold levels of suffering. When a group of
people like the Nazis begin to believe in the sub-human label they
propel, the group afflicted becomes the equivalent of animals, free to
be killed, tortured and dehumanized, free to be robbed of freedom,
opportunity and happiness.

The Nazis, however, are not alone in exacerbating this phenomenon. On
the contrary, it has been as pronounced in human history as
advancements in technology. As long as there have been competing
tribes the concept of untermensch has existed, released over and over
through centuries and millennia. No nation or culture is immune; no
epoch is innocent. With every war, invasion, occupation, domination,
enslavement, oppression, exploitation, genocide and ethnic cleansing
that has marked human time on Earth untermensch has been implemented,
used by the powerful to justify the crimes, rapes, murders and
dehumanization inflicted upon innocent fellow human beings.
Untermensch is the tool used by the human brain that grants man the
power to destroy humanity and all its virtues while inflicting untold
levels of misery onto men, women and children without the interference
or burden of human guilt, laws, theology, morality or righteousness
getting in the way.

Yet our minds cannot fathom the long reaches of a history marked by
incessant war, death and violence. Understanding the constructs of
time and space are not talents we have evolved. Grasping the enormity
of the passage of time, with the rise and fall of tribes, clans, city
states and empires, the evolution of human society and spirituality
from cave to metropolis, the genetic altering and evolution of
diversity coming together and adding to the human spectrum, and the
conquests, genocides and environmental changes created by our
ancestors is not a skill endowed into our primate brains, and thus the
enormous jigsaw puzzle that is human history remains a mystery. We can
barely put together the pieces of our own eighty year existence on the
planet, even as it is a puzzle that we experience first hand. How then
are we to fathom hundreds of thousands of years of modern human
existence, generation upon generation, century after century?

In an existence estimated at five million years, from primates living
in trees to the dawn of living in one-hundred story skyscrapers, man
has not deviated from our mammal selves. Our passions, emotions and
behaviors yield to the animal inside us, and throughout our existence
it has come out again and again to unleash terror on our unsuspecting
species. For millions of years our species has consisted of one
continuous epoch of aggression against each other, with periods of
calm in between, - controlled at the individual level but becoming an
unleashed monster at the tribal - destroying all we have achieved and
the beauty inherent in our existence. Mammals we are, and mammals we
will remain, yet the ego of our existence and the theology of our
beliefs will not let us awake to our greatest truth.

Humankind's greatest demon is also our greatest threat, condemning us
to continue a long history of self-inflicted war, death, suffering and
subjugation. In this quandary we find ourselves trapped in, much like
every generation that has come before, and, if we fail to learn and
evolve, every generation that has yet to come. The worst of humanity
opens the books of history once more, and in Iraq and Palestine we
find what has been, what is, and what will become. The Reign of Terror
upon ourselves continues the slow erosion of our existence along the
inevitable path of self-destruction we traverse.

Is it any wonder that the virus attached to us since we left the
jungles of east Africa keeps reappearing again and again, stomping its
seal of death, violence and misery on the face of human civilization,
especially when we punish our own kind with the tools of despair,
suffering and dehumanization? Can we expect the microscopic reign of
modern man to purge an evil that primitive man could not exorcise in
hundreds of thousands of years?

Untermensch is part of the disease we possess, or rather possesses us,
attached to the constructs of fear and hatred, ignorance and
superiority, emboldened by the tribe or nation state. The mega-tribes
of today only serve to strengthen and release the fury of human evil
onto those less fortunate. It is a syndrome that, until now, has yet
to be contained. Its vicious mechanisms erode the basic foundations of
humankind, birthing suffering and human destruction, both in spirit
and in life, rendering all six billion of us less human every day.
Into the depths we descend, living the misery of Iraqis and
Palestinians, feeling the pain that the powerful inflict on the weak,
losing energy with each drop of blood that is shed and cowering in
shame with each act of decaying dehumanization.

The Untermensch Syndrome is alive and well, resilient as ever,
surviving as long as humans exist, thriving off our own shortcomings,
evolving with each passing generation and festering once more to
infect yet one more amalgam of human tribes from which enlightenment
seems never to arrive.

Unholy Land

In the land claimed holy and promised the madness of humankind
persists, extending the perpetual violence and oppression of the weak
by the powerful. Palestine today tells a story of human evils past and
present, of the worst actions capable of being manifested by the human
phenomenon. Lands ancient and strategic, crossroads and focal points
of man's brief history, once more seem engulfed by competing claims
and boiling hatreds.

Malevolent crimes against humanity, those activities that repulse and
anger, are methodically being perpetrated against peoples who have
been raped of all their ancestors once possessed. Atrocities and
dehumanization on an unparalleled scale are being committed, becoming
the present reincarnation of the past's dreaded evils.

In no other place on Earth is the suffering of our brothers and
sisters so prevalent. In no other region is the tyranny and wickedness
of humanity so present. For the lands holy and promised have been
cursed by archaic fables, beliefs and myths, by fictional claims of
days long extinct, condemning its native inhabitants to the bowels of
Hades and the desolate realities from which loud cries go unheard.

To be Palestinian Arab in the land usurped by European Jews is to be
considered untermensch in the territory your forefathers once called
home. The devastation fifty-five years of invasion, occupation and
state terrorism has had on both people and land has created the
conditions by which Gaza and the West Bank can today be called Hell on
Earth, pockets of destitute emptiness where opportunity is extinct and
any relevant future is a but a hollow fantasy.

Unearthed from the colon of the planet Palestinians dwell, the squalor
in the occupied territories is beyond compare, instituted and
exacerbated by the state of Israel in acts of unhindered and systemic
malevolence. The intent of such inflictions of emotional distress and
incessant pain and suffering is the breaking point of millions of
Palestinians, the realization that it is better to leave the land you
know and love rather than live in perpetual imprisonment of spirit and
humanity.

The desire to expand borders and territory, an addiction to greed and
the aspiration to cleanse Palestine of Arabs manufactures in the
Israeli government a policy of wicked objectives bursting with cold
and calculated cruelty. Thus, the ill-treatment of Palestinians by
Israel makes life so unbearable, so hard and depressing that it is a
triumph of the human spirit that so many remain, unwavering and
strong, even as the weight of utter wickedness is enforced generation
to generation.

Living in the occupied territories is like living in Warsaw ghettos of
the 1930's and South African Bantustans. It is akin to dwelling in
Indian reservations, those cesspools of nothingness in the lands of
America from where millions rotted away their once vibrant existence.
Gaza and the West Bank are squalors of humanity acting as giant
prisons, where dense refugee camps are considered cities, their
perimeters encircled by fences, walls, Israeli tanks and the ever
watchful eyes of trigger-friendly snipers. Enormous prisons within
occupied lands, preventing contiguity, freedom of movement and any
semblance of a sovereign state are the true definition of the West
Bank and Gaza Strip.

To live inside these vast prisons and internment camps is to struggle
with the daily existence of Israeli suffocation and dehumanization
that you know is purposeful as it is deliberate. It is to feel Israeli
claws strangulating your esophagus, denying you of the air to breathe
and the sustenance you need to survive. Life under Israel's merciless
rule means that sixty to seventy percent of your people are
unemployed, unable to provide for their families, as commerce is
almost non-existent and access to Israeli business almost impossible.
It is to live in worlds of child undernourishment and lack of
healthcare, as Israel's policies make indigent millions of families
who desperately need to feed and treat their children.

To be Palestinian is to be trapped in a vicious circle that refuses to
let you escape. From birth your undernourishment outmaneuvers your
development, stunting your growth, making your immune system weak and
altering your ability to learn. Lack of nutrients and perpetual levels
of stress make your environmental upbringing unlike anything on Earth,
a constant battle being lost by both your body and mind.

Psychological behaviors associated with extreme levels of stress and
dangerous levels of undernourishment affect hundreds of thousands of
your fellow brothers and sisters. Feelings of imprisonment and virtual
subjugation, not to mention the extreme hatred of anything Israel your
environment forces upon you creates unsurpassed hatred in your mind.
Education is limited, resources to tap the oasis inside you is but a
dream and the talents and abilities ingrained in your being get eroded
more and more with each passing year.

You see the vanishing energies of neighbors, acquaintances and family
that die at the hands of the IDF and the Israeli government's callous
disregard for your people. After all, to them you are nothing but
untermensch, lower to or on equal par with animals. From an early age
you realize that, since you are seen as sub-human, IDF soldiers treat
you with impunity, allowing themselves the pleasure of taunting your
friends, shooting your cousins, demolishing your home and dehumanizing
your mother, all done knowing that accountability does not exist.

Growing up Palestinian is to see with one's eyes the hatred boiling
inside the cities you live in, where the fruitless throwing of rocks
towards tanks by dozens of youth is the only vent from where their
bursting fumes can be released. Later on in life, these youngsters
will become members of the resistance, graduating to Kalashnikovs and
home-made bombs, lurking at night to defend their ever disappearing
homeland. In this society, death at the hands of the Israelis is so
commonplace that it is celebrated, becoming both a rallying cry and
mechanism of strength. Martyrs are elevated to the skies above,
becoming the role models of the very young and the heroes of the
populace, their faces plastered on posters lining streets and walls.

In this society, born of occupation and seething hatred, the only way
to keep living is to keep dying, and the sadness of such reality is
that just as our children wish to become pilots and firemen, theirs
strive for nothing more than martyrdom. It is this that Israel's
policy of untermensch has created, a mechanism where every day creates
new resistance fighters and revolutionaries seeking the triumph of the
human spirit and the dawn of independent freedom.

Collective punishment upon millions of Palestinians goes hand in hand
with the Untermensch Syndrome, where the acts of a few result in the
decimation of the many. When millions of Arabs are considered
sub-human, long living in lands claimed by false divinity and thousand
year old fables of peoples primitive and unenlightened, their death,
destruction and prolonged suffering is inconsequential. It is state
sponsored terrorism that has lasted more than eighty years in a
pre-emptive attempt to ethnically cleanse by subjugation,
dehumanization and cold and calculated suffering.

Breeding of fear by the intimidation of army incursions, tank
deployments, sniper killings, Apache helicopter missiles and fighter
jet low altitude flyovers is state sponsored terror, stressing out
millions and making life under occupation an unbearable existence.
Imprisoning millions and subjecting them to perpetual indigence,
without ability to traverse their own lands or go one day breathing
tranquil airs of calm and freedom is collective terror upon a
populace. Not knowing if your home is next to be demolished by
monstrous Caterpillar bulldozers, usually with a few minutes warning
by the IDF is state terrorism, robbing families of their homes and
their belongings, leaving thousands without the only dignity they ever
possessed.

Treating Palestinians as untermensch allows young Israeli soldiers,
most of whom are born hating Palestinians, to walk over innocent
people only trying to survive day to day. Stinging verbal abuse,
humiliating body searches, purposeful closures and damning delays at
checkpoints, where the Untermensch Syndrome can be seen in full bloom,
exhibits the wicked treatment of the powerful over the weak. Selected
closures that can last days that in effect prevent Palestinians from
getting to work, indiscriminate authority to harass and stop anyone
from passing, the apartheid mechanism of different license plates for
Jewish settlers - with unhindered passage through checkpoints - and
Palestinians - who oftentimes wait hours in line before being allowed
through - are all symptoms of the sub-human treatment and collective
punishment of Palestinians.

Even ambulances, oftentimes transporting gravely injured or sick
people, many of them pregnant women on the verge of giving birth, are
forced to endure long hours waiting at IDF checkpoints, with the full
knowledge of soldiers. Many of these people, not unexpectedly, end up
dying while waiting, as precious time is squandered and criminally
left to pass. If this is not terror, then what is? If this is not
collective punishment and a symptom of the Untermensch Syndrome, then
where has our humanity gone?

When an occupying power gives carte blanche to its military to treat
the occupied as sub-human, crimes against humanity are not too far
behind and the moral fabric of those imposing the will of the powerful
through the barrel of a gun quickly vanishes. In Palestine, and as has
become quite apparent in Iraq, indiscriminate and methodical
dehumanization, without regard for human rights, has flourished
through the aura of ethnic, state and cultural superiority and the
invincibility of modern military might.

Pitting rock throwers against Apache helicopters and Abrams tanks is
nobody's idea of a fair fight, and in this unequal capacity to wage
war we can see how the Untermensch Syndrome is furthered. One side
seeks independence using only the weapons their dwindling land
provides while the other is provided with the most sophisticated and
lethal technology known to man. It is a battle of primitive versus
modern, the Arab animals versus the Israeli westerner. And so, in
order to try evening out the fight, suicide bombers, with the
desperation, hate, thirst for vengeance and hopelessness ingrained in
their atrocious actions, compete with the state sponsored terrorism of
guided missiles raining down from the sky, artillery from tanks and
incursions by an infantry trained and supplied with the best equipment
American money can buy.

The equation of occupied and occupier has been the same for time
immemorial, with the subjugated resorting to the creations of the
human imagination and the resources at their disposal for weapons
while the conqueror uses rationales of untermensch to deceive its own
morality and unleash the fires of human hell with the grand weapons of
war that riches provide onto the people invaded.

In Palestine, untermensch has meant the demolition of thousands of
homes without regard for human life. It has meant the dehumanizing
conditions by which millions live under, usually in poverty and
lacking meaningful education, healthcare, infrastructure, opportunity
and future. Israel's treatment of an entire race of people has
destroyed the fabric of society and the aspirations of its citizens.
The Untermensch Syndrome has resulted in centuries old olive trees
bulldozed for no reason other than to make miserable the lives of the
farmers who owned them. It has categorized Palestinian as inferior to
Jew, marginalizing millions who are expropriated of their land and homes.

Because of the Untermensch Syndrome Palestine has been carved up into
dozens of enclaves, separated by walls or fences, imprisoning people
in their towns and refugee camps. Traveling from town to town is
virtually impossible. Children have been separated from their schools,
university students from their colleges, workers from their jobs,
families from each other and farmers from their fields. This has been
accomplished by Israel systematically and without remorse, serving no
purpose other than to dehumanize and make unlivable the daily lives of
millions.

Lands with higher ground are routinely expropriated, as are those with
fertile soil and abundant water aquifers. These stolen lands are then
granted to the swell of settlers rushing into once Palestinian lands
and farms. In other instances, Palestinian land is taken for bypass
road construction that now dissects the West Bank into easily
controllable blocks. Of course these roads can only be used by
Israelis and Jewish settlers, while the Palestinians, whose land is
now covered by asphalt, can only watch as Jewish cars circumvent the
last vestiges of a land they once flourished in.

In the course of the present intifadah 3000 Palestinians have died
compared to 1000 Israelis. The terrorism has been mutual, one modern
and technological, the other born out of hatred and desperation.
Palestinians see their native contiguously- inhabited land being
gobbled up by Israel and the never-ending stream of European and
American settlers. Their water is being taken, their crops destroyed,
their livelihoods eviscerated. An enormous apartheid wall is being
built, separating camp from camp, robbing them of still more land as
it snakes deep into occupied territory, making the West Bank an
amalgam of Bantustan-style reservations and internment camps. The
Untermensch Syndrome has been unleashed by an Israel that is intent on
'transferring' out an entire race of people.

Like a Virus the Syndrome Spreads

Like an enormous wave crashing on shore, the Untermensch Syndrome is
devastating everything in its path. In order to maintain a Jewish
majority, which demographics tells us is impossible if Arabs remain,
Israel is making the life of Palestinians a virtual dungeon of misery
from where air and light are squeezed out of the dark, damp caves
where Palestinians now dwell. The goal is as simple as it is macabre:
the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the 'Promised Land' by means of
starving millions of a life worth living and through the self-exodus
of Palestinians who cannot take the severe punishment and
dehumanization any more. This clandestine maneuver would thus be seen
as self-inflicted and as an independent move by the Palestinians, yet
it is Israel pushing them off the cliff through its criminal acts
against humanity.

Much is said of physical torture, yet it is the mental kind that truly
kills and maims, condemning the millions of Palestinians to a life
unbearable at best and cruel at worst. For many decades now Israel has
waged collective war against the native inhabitants of Palestine,
slowly but surely implementing the means by which it can achieve its
ends. Mental torture is a crime against humanity, in direct
contradiction to universal principles of humanity. It has been
persistent, incessant and coldly calculated. If the treatment of the
Palestinian people by the state of Israel is not terrorist in nature
and evil in substance, then we have vanished underneath a rock of
shamelessness and barbarity, becoming that which we most loathe.

What is occurring in Palestine today is nothing short of criminal,
reminiscent of the Nazi treatment of Jews and all other untermensch
during 1930's Germany. It reminds us of the extermination and
subsequent incarceration of Native Americans by a fledgling US
government riding the coattails of Manifest Destiny. Reservations are
today a sad reminder of the cruelty and inhumanity by which the
American government methodically eliminated the indigenous peoples
from the birth of a new nation. Parallels with the South African
Apartheid Bantustans are being made as more truth emerges from the
cages of the West Bank. The worst in humanity is now compared to the
Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people, and not without merit.

The Nazi ghettos and treatment of all untermensch in 1930's Europe
during the reign of human malevolence, which caused untold levels of
suffering, anguish and mental torture, lasted about a decade. The
Palestinian ghettos, Bantustans, reservations, cantons, prisons,
gulags or enclaves, - however you wish to call them - on the other
hand, have withstood the sands of time for several decades now. Under
virtual imprisonment, unable to move freely, without rights, liberties
and freedoms and increasingly under a state of siege and apartheid,
Palestinians find themselves struggling to survive and remain living
in the lands they have continuously inhabited for thousands of years.
Their very existence is being threatened; their society is being
imploded. Mental torture has become their way of life, like an
unrelenting leash controlling their lives, ceaseless in time and
devastating in magnitude.

They are, if you will, an endangered species, considered sub-human by
their occupiers and the Israeli puppets in the White House and the
Congress, who, even after the International Court of Justice
overwhelmingly condemned the Apartheid Wall as illegal under
international law, voted overwhelmingly to support Israel and condemn
the Court, also pressuring the cowardly UN to prevent the imposition
of sanctions on Israel. If our elected leaders in Washington show such
solidarity with the state of Israel in its inhuman acts of
criminality, do they think of Palestinians as untermensch as well? The
implication sure makes it seem that way, as does their treatment of
the Iraqi people.

Those who were once called untermensch are today subjugating those
they consider untermensch. The sub-humans of decades past have become
the subjugators and exploiters, spreading the disease that once
tormented their ancestors. Those who once suffered enormously are
today inflicting untold levels of suffering onto an entire group of
human beings. As if committing human evil on those it considers
sub-humans will exorcise the demons of horrors past, Israel's
treatment of the Palestinians serves no possible purpose other than to
devastate millions who are rotting away their existence in sewers of
hopelessness, hoping an entire people will simply disappear or pack up
and leave, thereby springing forth a final solution to the Palestinian
question.

The Untermensch has become the Übermensch, the Nazi word for overlord,
or supermen. The cleansed have become the ones doing the cleansing,
and those upon whom human evil once enveloped are today reincarnating
that same malice onto a world trying to never again repeat the errors
of past generations. Yet the Untermensch Syndrome refuses to be laid
to rest, living like rats among humans, forever to follow in our
footsteps, feeding off our crumbs and forever destined to haunt our
inner demons. If those it was once inflicted upon are today its
conductors and proliferators, does there exist hope for the human race?

As long as we let it control us, the Untermensch Syndrome will linger,
separating us from each other, seeing ourselves as superior and others
as sub-human. The situation in Iraq is a truth to this reality, it
simply repeats itself, no matter how enlightened we think we are and
no matter how modern we claim to be. If the pattern persists
throughout our existence, is there reason to hope for its demise?

What makes us human is not our ability to kill and destroy each other
but our vast potential to bring goodness to our fellow beings.
Killing, maiming and inflicting misery onto ourselves is nothing new.
It is rather easy for humans to do this. Just look back at history.
What is hard, and what makes us human, differentiating us from the
animal world, is the ability to turn the other cheek, see each other
as equals, accept our incredible diversity and stop the madness before
we all end up smoldering from the fiery hell we have contained in
silos and missiles. If we can create nuclear technology, enough to
destroy this planet thousands of times over, can we not put our heads
together and get along?

What is happening to the Palestinian people is a travesty, one more
black mark on an already bruised human society. It is up to the Other
Superpower to seek change, helping to bring an oasis of humanity to a
suddenly barren strip of earth. Our elected leaders will not act, and
neither will world organizations. It is up to us, the people of the
world, to stand tall and shout with one united voice from deep within
our bodies that we are in solidarity with those considered as
untermensch, that if Palestinians are sub-human, then so are we,
because they are human just like you and me, deserving of a life lived
in happiness and opportunity, free of occupation and tyranny.

For the moral high ground cannot be usurped as easily as Israel robs
Palestinian lands bearing higher ground, strategic locations, water
aquifers and fertile land. The moral high ground in this battle is on
the side of the occupied and subjugated, of justice and humanity, of
those resisting and fighting for land they once possessed and freedom
once enjoyed. It is void and non-existent in the grip of the
occupiers, exploiters and criminals who produce life unbearable and
dehumanizing. For this battle they cannot win because the travesty of
the Palestinians is the reality billions of eyes and minds now see. Is
it any wonder why the rise in anti-Semitism worldwide coincides with
the escalating campaign to destroy the Palestinian people? Can we not
see why Israel is considered the most hated nation on Earth, from
opinions resulting in the last few years, and why its policies are
endangering innocent and peace loving people of Jewish faith worldwide
who only want to live free of the hatreds of the past and in full
acceptance of the happiness of the years to come?

Never Again, Never Again

The time to boycott Israeli products has arrived. Let the sanctions
imposed by the Other Superpower begin, unleashing the economic might
of billions to punish those few who care nothing for international law
or the universal declarations of human rights. May the cancer
spreading dehumanization and misery on our fellow human beings stop
being spread by the power and medicine of the people of the world. We
succeeded once before, halting the destructive forces of apartheid
South Africa, now a nation evolving forward in time, not regressing
backwards in history. We will once more quash wrongness, wickedness
and human evil. It is the echoes of justice and human rights emanated
by the voices of truth that will tear down yet another wall of shame
being built to imprison and condemn.

Let us punish American and multinational corporations that help arm
the IDF, those that help bulldoze homes and lives, those that profit
from human misery and those that through their instruments of death
and destruction contribute to the murder and slaughter of innocents.
Let us pressure our so-called representatives to stand for human
rights, dignity and justice, not tyranny, misery and subjugation.

What is transpiring in the Holy Land is anathema to human
civilization; it is an embarrassment to six billion people who are
good, decent human beings. If our governments refuse to act, then so
we must, for the sake of innocent and peaceful Palestinian and Israeli
people, for the sake of human decency and for the sake of our future
generations. Walls and fences that imprison and dehumanize cannot
stand, for they help set mankind back in time to days dark and
repressive, unenlightened and barbaric. Together, united as one we can
become the massive tremor that helps bring walls and tyranny down.

"Never Again" should not just be a catchy slogan, an artifact at
museums, a banner espoused but never practiced or a phrase attached to
nostalgia. It should mean what it says, and, as the Other Superpower,
we should interpret it literally, enforcing it upon those whose crimes
against humanity make us all less human by the day.

In numbers we find strength; in conviction, reason to exist. Those
seeking freedom can never be defeated; the triumph of the human spirit
can never be erased. The seeds of justice have been planted, let us
reap its bountiful reward. Let us once more make a beautiful oasis of
a land both holy and promised, devoid of barren intentions and evil
inclinations. Let olive trees grow anew, let children play and laugh,
may the light of day return and once more bring forth skies of blue.

This essay, first published in August 2004, is dedicated to the over
3000 Palestinian and 1000 Israeli dead, who, in the last five years,
have perished thanks to the sickness of human nature, as well as to
the hundreds of Lebanese civilians and tens of northern Israelis
slaughtered by the latest wave of Middle East violence. This essay is
also dedicated to the thousands of injured on both sides, the
thousands more who have lost loved ones, and the peace-loving,
tolerance-striving, justice-seeking peoples of the Holy Land, all of
whom have suffered enormously for the last four years. May you have
the strength to put an end to madness and the worst in the human
condition. May your troubled land find the peace you and the world
desperately needs.

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