The Beat Goes On

 

Well, as Sonny and Cher once warbled, way back in 1967, The Beat Goes On.

Drums keep pounding rhythm to the brain.

Trump keeps making a joke of the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. and Israel keep making a mockery of international law.

La da da da dee, La dee da da dah…..

 

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On the world stage, the old U.S. of A. sank to a new low last week at the International Criminal Court. Our man at the Hague, one Joshua Simmons, a lawyer for the State Department, argued in defense of Israel deliberately starving the people of Gaza.

Simmons argued, with a straight face, that Israel was acting lawfully when it banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency from bringing in food, medicine, and other supplies into Gaza as of January 30 of this year. Their blockade was lawful because Israel had alleged that some UNRWA employees were Hamas agents.

UNRWA employs some 30,000 people across the Middle East. The the majority of these are Palestinian refugees who have directly witnessed Israel’s treatment of Palestinians over not just the last year and a half but the last several decades. It would be surprising if a great many of them were not, at the very least, sympathetic to Hamas’s cause.

It does not logically follow that all Palestinians should therefore be starved.

The same logic could be after, reversed.  A lot of Israelis are sympathetic to -- and directly involved in -- Israel’s criminal campaign to terrorize Palestinians off their map. Would it therefore be justified to starve all Israelis?

Moreover, though UNRWA is the most important aid provider to Gaza, it’s not the only one, and they all are being blocked from helping Palestinians not starve.

Meanwhile, images of starving Palestinian children are becoming increasingly easy to find on the internet.