Blinken wants to spend time with his kids

After he is done depriving Palestinian parents any future with their kids.

In the course of Israel’s soon-to-be-year-long genocide of a ghettoised people blockaded for nearly two decades in a tiny strip of land deemed “unlivable” over six years ago, we have seen some of the ghastliest crimes against humanity that only the most depraved minds could think of inflicting on a besieged, defenceless population comprising over a million children.

In a slaughter of monstrous scale, a minimum of 186,000 people were estimated to have been killed by the barbaric Israelis by early July. There have been two more months of slaughter since then which takes the tally well over that number. A vast majority of those butchered have been children and women. Even if we take the most conservative estimate (that of Gaza’s health ministry which only counts bodies that reach hospitals), over 18,000 children have been killed. Some of those children were slaughtered with their entire families, leaving no one to mourn them.

Some parents haven’t been as fortunate.

Take for example Muhammad Abu al-Qusman. He went to get the birth certificates of his days-old twins, Aser and Aseel; by the time he returned with the certificates they were dead along with their mother, all of them killed by Israeli bombing. “Five minutes after getting the birth certificate, I was getting their death certificates,” rued al-Qusman.

Hind Rajab, all of 6, was slaughtered alongside several relatives as they attempted to flee their besieged neighbourhood. As their car came under heavy fire and all her relatives died, Hind called for help but it would never come: the Israelis also murdered the two paramedics who went to rescue her. Hind’s car had 335 bullet holes. Her mother recalled telling little Hind on one particular night of intense Israeli bombing: “Hanoud, I only want to stay alive to see you grow up into a young woman.”

Ahmad al-Najjar didn’t grow old enough to even see 6 years of life. Israelis beheaded him at 18 months. The little boy, who loved playing on the trampoline, soccer, and cats, had to be buried headless. “I did not know his head was cut off during the bombing. I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes in the Sultan clinic,” his father Abdul Hafez recounted the tragedy of losing not just Ahmad but another son, a daughter and his wife in the same bombing in Rafah. “I saw the bodies of my wife Faten, and daughter Huda, my son Arkan and my baby Ahmad. I was told he was headless; I just peeked inside the body bag and saw his body without a head, and I couldn’t stand to see it anymore.”

Muhammad Bhar with his toys.

Muhammad Bhar’s mother had to bury his decomposing, worm-eaten corpse after the Israelis let a dog maul him. 24-year-old Bhar had the mind of a toddler due to Down syndrome. He never spoke a word until attacked by an Israeli dog, whom he told, “Khalas, ya habibi” [enough, my dear] as it bit him. The Israelis killed him and left his corpse to rot before his family got to it a week later. “I could hear Muhammed humming in pain. Now and then, they [Israeli soldiers] would open the door, look at him, and say ‘Oskot’ [Arabic for stay silent], then close it again,” Muhammad’s mother Nabila Ahmad Bhar recounted her last memories of her son.

Khaled Said al-Shawa wasn’t even fortune enough to get any media coverage after his death. He was mere collateral damage, only to be remembered by his mother, who was determined to dignify his life. “My son is not a number, not unknown. My son’s name is Khaled Said al-Shawa, and he was the only boy among his sisters. He was martyred while returning from his daily trip to deliver food to our injured neighbour,” she said.

When the Israelis targeted the first Gaza hospital, Al Ahli Baptist Hospital, during the early days of their genocide, it produced the most ghastly image of their barbarism until then: a father carrying the remains of his son in grocery bags.

The remains of Palestinians killed in the fajr massacre.

The Israelis have since gone on to make shredding children into tiny pieces a standard operating procedure.

In the aftermath of the August fajr massacre, in which the Jewish supremacists slaughtered over a hundred people gathered for the morning prayer, parents were handed the remains of their children by the kilo in grocery bags. Imagine as a parent hearing something like: “Here’s 23 kilos of your son, Abdullah.” One father recalled: “As I carried the heavy bag, I remembered a day when I returned from the market with a heavy load. My son, in his innocent eagerness, offered to carry it for me. He proudly showed his strength to his mother and siblings, boasting that he had carried it all by himself for his father. Now, you are leading me home again with this bag. But how can I be sure that the remains inside belong to you? The laughter that once filled our home, your skinny arms playfully wrestling with your siblings, your head resting on grandmother’s lap, and your tiny feet that used to search for water and aid — everything is now reduced to this single bag.”

One of the many reasons natural deaths are relatively bearable is because there is no culprit to wrestle with for the demise. There is only so much resentment one can hold against heart attack, cancer or old age. But in a deliberate slaughter, like the one in Gaza, the culprits are right there. They are not just there, but they are projected — by themselves and by their propaganda apparatus — as the good guys. They laugh, clink glasses, hold press conferences, and talk about spending time with their kids in retirement.

Perversely, they also get to live long. Kissinger hit a century. Rumsfeld lived to 88. Cheney is still around at 83.

Anthony Bourdain once remarked about the war criminal Secretary of State Kissinger, who oversaw the slaughter of innocents in multiple countries, including Cambodia, thus: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”

Had he still been around, a conscientious man like Bourdain would have added plenty more names alongside Kissinger’s over the past year. The Americans killed over a quarter of a million of the poor and helpless Cambodians over five years between 1969 and 1973, the Israelis (with every possible help from the Americans) have achieved a similar tally within a year.

Blinken, 62, the current incumbent in Kissinger’s role, has been Israel’s manna from heaven. An avid Zionist, he has done everything he could possibly do to facilitate the Israeli genocide. He directly spread the most perverse of Israeli propaganda about October 7, has kept the supply of arms unobstructed, and claimed on multiple occasions that the Israelis accepted ceasefire deals when they did no such thing.

Blinken, the dishonest American broker, even went to Egypt in the very first week of the ongoing genocide to tell the Egyptian tyrant Sisi, whose country shares Gaza’s only non-Israeli land border, that he was talking to him as a Jew! Imagine the perfectly reasonable indignation if a Muslim Secretary of State went to broker peace between India and Pakistan and told the Pakistani prime minister he was talking to him as a Muslim. If his remarks to Sisi doesn’t tell you who Blinken has actually been representing since October 7, nothing will.

Now he is done and already planning his post-retirment future.

“As to my own future, all I’m looking at right now is the balance of this administration and January,” shared Blinken. “And I can tell you from having spent some time over the last week on … break with my kids, I will relish having a lot more time with them.”

After delivering many Palestinian parents their kids in body bags and grocery bags in a perverse, depraved, inhuman foreign policy that he oversaw, at least in one honest admission, as a Jew, Blinken will relish having a lot more time with his kids once he washes his hands smeared in Palestinian blood.

Thousands of Palestinians parents, however, will have no such privilege of living their final days in the company of their kids. Beheaded Ahmad’s brother, Muhammad, cannot bear his tragic loss. The young boy doesn’t want to live any more. “I hope to be killed so I can join him in heaven. I miss my sister and brothers, I miss them all,” he says. It’s a reasonable guess that Muhammad is speaking for a vast majority, if not all, of the thousands of Palestinian parents who have lost their children to the Israeli-American barbarism.

Not for them the privileged retirement of Antony Blinken, one of the butchers of Gaza.

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