By James E. Jennings*
ATLANTA, USA | 19 October 2024 (IDN) — Crocodiles shed copious tears while eating their prey. “Crocodile Tears” has therefore become a slogan for insincerity and hypocrisy. It’s a bit late, while gnawing on a human or other prey, to cry tears for the victim. Even if the tears were sincere, which they are not, these fearsome reptiles just keep chomping and gorging until their meal is swallowed whole.
The United States’ support for Israel’s one-sided, wholesale destruction of Gaza is like that. After a full year and an entire week of certifiable war crimes and genocide in Gaza fully backed by the United States, along comes Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin with a gentle letter to Israel from the Biden White House. The Oct 13 missive said that Israel should allow humanitarian aid to reach Gaza’s beleaguered citizens or there will be “consequences.”
That’s an old song that nobody takes seriously. It’s like a substitute schoolteacher warning out of control students that there will be “consequences,” when everybody knows it’s not true. Nobody is buying such cheap showmanship at the nth hour just before the US elections.
Israel’s far out over the edge right-wing government completely stopped food and medicine into Gaza for several weeks to coincide with their ethnic cleansing policy for north Gaza. After receiving the letter, the Israeli government pledged to allow international aid deliveries to begin again.
Yet Prime Minister Netanyahu has already said that nobody can tell Israel what to do in terms of its military actions in Gaza or Lebanon. He will likely smile, nod, and ignore the letter. That’s because he knows that the United States—just in the last week or so—has supplied Israel with the latest high-tech missile defense system and 100 US troops to operate it.
Hypocrisy
This kind of hypocrisy from the Biden Administration is enough to make even a crocodile blush. If the US political establishment—Democrats and Republicans, House and Senate, along with most Americans—had cared at all about the lives of the millions of people facing starvation and disease in Gaza, they would have already shown compassion for their plight 365 + 7 days ago.
That’s not to mention the almost 42,000 largely civilian deaths in Gaza, the nearly 100,000 people wounded, the many thousands buried under the rubble, and an uncounted number of people, many of them children, severely handicapped for life.
Hospitals in Gaza have long ago been facing impossibilities, and getting extreme cases out of the territory to save their lives is next to impossible. Much of this carnage could have been prevented if there were a sincere desire to save lives and lessen unnecessary human suffering from the early stages of the war until now.
The world’s human rights organizations will not forget; neither will the various UN missions, international aid organizations, and millions of people around the world appalled at the carnage and hypocrisy. True compassion is not crying tears while you are at the same time consuming the victim.
It is being clear-eyed about what’s happening in our world and calling it what it is—the continuing genocidal slaughter of men, women, and children, aided and abetted by the US political establishment and arms manufacturers.
*James E. Jennings, PhD is President of Conscience International. His organization has delivered aid directly to hospitals in Beirut and Gaza since 1982. [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image credit: Anadolu Ajansi