The Silence of a Nation - Speech by Chris Hedges
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"The incursion and bombardment of Gaza is not about destroying Hamas. It is not about stopping rocket fire into Israel. It is not about achieving peace. The Israeli decision to rain death and destruction on Gaza, to use lethal weapons of the modern battle field on a largely defenseless civilian population is the final phase in the decades long campaign to ethnically cleanse Palestinians. The Assault on Gaza is about creating squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos. In the West Bank and Gaza, where life for the Palestinians will be barely sustainable. It is about building a series of ringed Palestinian enclaves where the Israeli military will have the ability to instantly shut off movement of food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery.

Privilege and power, especially military power is a dangerous narcotic. Violence destroys those who bear the brunt of its force, but also those who use it to try to become Gods. Israel uses sophisticated attack jets and Naval vessels to bomb densely crowded refugee camps, schools, apartment blocks mosques and slums, to attack a population that has no air force, no air defense, no navy, no heavy weapons, no artillery units, no mechanized armor, no command and control, no army and calls it a war. It is not a war. It is Murder. Images of dead Palestinian children lined up as if asleep on the floor of the mail hospital in Gaza are a metaphor for the future.

Israel will from now on speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. Those who orchestrate such sieges do not grasp the terrible rage of long humiliation indiscriminate violence and abuse. A father or a mother whose child dies to a lack of vaccines or proper medical care does not forget. A boy who's ill grandmother dies while being detained at an Israeli checkpoint does not forget. Families who carry the broken bodies of their children to hospitals do not forget. All who endure humiliation, abuse and the murder of those they love do not forget. This rage becomes a virus within those who eventually stumble out into the daylight. Is it any wonder that 71 percent of children interviewed at a school in Gaza recently said they wanted to be a martyr.

The refusal by our political leaders from Barrack Obama to all but 5 members of Congress to the major media to speak out in defense of the rule of law and fundamental human rights exposes our cowardice and our hypocrisy. A public debate about the Gaza attack engages in the absurd pretense that it is Israel, not the Palestinians who's security and dignity is being threatened. This blind defense of Israeli brutality toward the Palestinians is a betrayal of the memory of all those killed in other Genocides in other times.

The lesson of the holocaust is not that Jews are special. It is not that Jews are unique. It is not that Jews are eternal victims. The lesson of the holocaust is that when you have the capacity to hold genocide and you do not, no matter who carries out that genocide, or who it is directed against, you are culpable. And we are very culpable. The F16 fighter jets, the Apache attack helicopters, the 250 pound smart GBU39 bombs are all a part of the $3 Billion dollar aid we give to Israel. Palestinians are being killed tonight with American made weapons. But perhaps our callous indifference to human suffering is to be expected. We (after all) kill women and children on an even vaster scale in Iraq and Afghanistan."
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Chris Hedges is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and war correspondent specializing in American and Middle Eastern politics and societies.

He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.