A new standard of barbarism

On the implications of the Israeli genocide in Gaza.

There was yet another massacre in Gaza at the hands of the Israeli terrorists. This was an airstrike on one of the few still standing five-story buildings in Beit Lahia on Sunday. The initial death toll was put at 72, with many bodies still under the rubble. Familiar scenes of mangled and shredded bodies, soot-covered survivors screaming in pain, and despairing good Samaritans rummaging through the rubble to find trapped bodies and any potential survivors abound. Since civil defence in northern Gaza has been rendered non-functional after their vehicles and equipment were bombed regularly by the Israelis, and hospitals in the north are barely operating, if at all, the injured either already died or will likely die an excruciating death.

On the 400th day of the ongoing genocide, the Gaza Media Office put the number of massacres until then at 3,798. With an average of ten massacres a day, that number has significantly gone up, with the school massacre being one of the worst in the last few days.

Back when I still had a job, my two-hour bus rides to and from work were somewhat bearable for the lively conversations I would have with a dear friend and colleague. In the very early days of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, it was all we would talk about. Israeli barbarism, Jewish exceptionalism, Palestinian helplessness, the myth of international law and order, etc. One day I posed a question: do you think the Israelis are as barbaric as the Indian Hindu nationalists? Having closely followed and studied the excesses of the Hindutva regime in India since the time Modi oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom in the state of Gujarat in 2002, my friend was well positioned to have an informed opinion on the matter.

The 2002 pogrom catapulted Modi, then chief minister of his home state of Gujarat, to unprecedented stardom among the Indian Hindus and ultimately to the highest political office in the land, becoming the prime minister in 2014. My friend was acutely aware of the savage brutality of the extremist Indian Hindus against Muslims, especially during the Gujarat pogrom, but also the banality of evil that the Modi regime has normalised all across the country since becoming prime minister.

To give you a small sample of the Hindu extremist savagery, during the 2002 pogrom, in which nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed, a group of Hindus cut open the belly of a pregnant Muslim woman and brandished the foetus on a sword. The culprit himself revealed in a sting operation, “There was this pregnant woman, I slit her open.” (Astonishingly, in the immediate aftermath of October 7, an extremist Hindu “journalist” recast this true story of Hindu barbarism onto Hamas freedom fighters! When someone asked him for the source of the info, the propagandist tweeted with a straight face: “From my friend Avishay from ground who has the photographs with her. Can’t post it.” The tweets still remain up.)

Many methods of killing Muslims were adopted by the Hindus in 2002. The foetus-brandishing terrorist further revealed: “Hacked, burnt, set on fire, many things were done.” In one infamous case, a Muslim woman was gangraped by 11 men. In another egregious case of barbarism, a Muslim politician’s limbs were chopped off in the courtyard of his house before the Hindu gangs set him on fire.

Once Modi became prime minister, Hindu impunity was no longer confined to Gujarat, it became nationwide. Anti-Muslim pogroms have become all too common. One such pogrom was conducted right in the heart of the Indian capital in 2020 when President Donald Trump was a state guest just a few kilometres from the site of the carnage. Other than during state-sponsored pogroms, Muslims also have had to contend with being hacked to death, set on fire, stabbed, among a sundry other brutalities for no other reason than being Muslim. When Hindus convicted of lynching a Muslim came out of prison a Hindu minister garlanded them. Killing or attacking Muslims fast tracks political careers. (Even a Christian community in the east Indian state of Manipur recently underwent a nearly year-long pogrom that was barely covered in the mainstream press. Violence in the region, with nearly an even Christian and Hindu population — about 41 percent each — restarted this week.)

To my question, the friend answered no. He posited that the only reason the Indian Hindus haven’t shown the same scale of barbarism as the Israelis is because they don’t have the necessary tools. I merely nodded.

He didn’t bring it up, but I now recall that the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), has in recent years often chided India for its treatment of minorities. Although this federal commission only makes policy recommendations and doesn’t have any enforcement powers, its reports on the lack of religious freedom in India do make the news cycle and elicit bile from the Indian government. For example, when the USCIRF put India in its list of “Countries of Particular Concern,” the Indian government instead of addressing the matter issued a statement that deployed the proverbial turning of the tables, “We regard it [USCIRF] as an organisation of particular concern and will treat it accordingly.”

In 2015, Obama’s remark that “India will succeed so long as it is not splintered along the lines of religious faith” was interpreted by the Modi government and its flunkeys in the media as a rebuke for its oppression of the Indian minorities.

My friend didn’t bring these instances up during our discussion, but I am pretty sure this is what he meant when he said that the Hindus lacked the necessary tools to inflict the same scale of barbarism as the Israelis have been dealing to the Palestinians.

No such check exists for the Israeli Jews, who get weapons from the West whenever and however many they want, and instead of rebuking State Department officials and American politicians indulge in all kinds of mental and verbal gymnastics to shield the Israelis from any criticism for their demonic behaviour.

Without doubt, the hatred of Muslims among the Indian Hindus rivals the Israeli hatred of Palestinians/Arabs/Muslims. But from what we have seen over the past 14 months, it is evident that the Israelis have completely altered the way people will think of barbarism and norms of acceptable behaviour during warfare after Gaza, if there is a world after Gaza.

We haven’t given a proper thought to the implication of the Israeli barbarism in Gaza. Sure, there have been wars in the past, most of them unjust and barbaric. Just since the turn of the millennium, for example, the United States has decimated Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Yemen, parts of northern Pakistan, and Ukraine — without counting its covert dirty wars in parts of Africa, central and South America, and Asia. These wars have been devastating to the natives, totally upending their lives and reducing them to a miserable existence. If you just look at Iraq, the Western powers have killed upwards of a million innocent Iraqis. Their illegal, savage war in the cradle of human civilisation saw them attack hospitals, weddings, and funerals. There has been copious proof of their criminal troops running bulldozers over civilian cars, killing journalists, dropping enriched uranium bombs over localities that has led to birth defects, and killing children in their bedrooms.

The Israelis have taken these acts of savagery to a level that’s unfathomable.

By the last count, the Israeli genocidaires had dropped over 85,000 tons of bombs on the tiny enclave that packed 2.3 million people in just 365 square kilometres of space with nowhere to run. The Israelis have raped children, women, and men with rods and other objects. They have dismantled every single one of the 36 hospitals in Gaza multiple times. They have dropped banned chemical weapons on civilians. They have poisoned and bombed water reservoirs. They have bombed aid convoys. They have bombed people waiting their turn to receive flour and then gunned down the survivors. They have killed children waiting in line for biscuits. They have stripped men naked and marched them to concentration camps. They have raped and tortured doctors to death. Doctors returning from Gaza have given testimonies of the accuracy with which Israeli snipers have shot Palestinian children in their heads and hearts. The Israelis have run bulldozers over children, leaving a mush of human flesh of once lively young boys and girls.

I could go on and on for thousands of more words just describing the horrors the Israelis have inflicted over Palestinians in Gaza for the last 14 months in broad daylight, all filmed for eternity. A mere list of broad categories of Israeli crimes prepared by the Gaza Media Office marking the 400 days of genocide ran into 61 bullet points and over 550 words.

Moreover, while most armies commit their crimes in secrecy and fear the evidence of their acts coming to light, the Israelis have broadcast their crimes to the whole world voluntarily. We have documented proof of everything, starting from the genocidal statements from the Israeli leadership and its foot soldiers to the actual genocidal acts being committed in Gaza.

Now every time I share news of the latest Israeli savagery it is just another time posting that same Israeli savagery with a different victim, at a different time, and probably at a different place. I would be lying if I say it doesn’t feel meaningless at times. How many times have they rounded up Palestinian men, stripped them of their clothing and led them away to torture cells? How many houses have the Israelis collapsed on the heads of residents? How many innocents have they incinerated to ashes? How many children have they starved to deaths?

Fourteen months of this horror and there’s still no end in sight.

The Hindus of India couldn’t get away with this. Probably no one could other than the Jewish supremacists. The foetus-stabbing Indian extremist confessed to his crime unaware of the presence of the hidden camera. Even Tulsi Gabbard, a rabid Islamophobe whose campaign runs for Congress were heavily funded by Modi-aligned American Hindus, had to distance herself from them to some extent. Modi doesn’t even speak about Manipur. The Americans fought tooth and nail to hide their war crimes in the Hadeetha massacre. The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse came to light only due to leaks.

The Israelis, on the other hand, couldn’t be more proud of their genocidal acts. Netanyahu and his minions never stop talking about the “Amalek” and “human animals” of Palestine who must be exterminated to make way for Jews-only settlements. The Israeli foot soldiers dedicate the torching of houses and detonation of buildings to their spouses and children and post it on social media. The emboldened Jewish war criminals on their genocide break go over to Amsterdam and Paris and run rampant with their thuggery; but instead of admonition, the Western leadership bats for them at the expense of their own citizens — such is Jewish impunity and such is Jewish exceptionalism that the victims of Jews are criminalised while the Jewish perpetrators of crimes are given a free rein to do as they please.

Shaban al-Dalou englufed in flames of Israel's making.

The Israelis have set a new standard of barbarism with their genocide in Gaza and with it they have also altered the way we will see savagery in wars from here on. But we cannot allow this demonic behaviour to be normalised no matter how much we have witnessed it. Mere witnessing it has done us untold harm, its normalisation will devour us all.

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