Tag: dehumanization

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Hunger, looting and lost childhoods: Gaza’s engineered collapse by Ahmed Abu Artema

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

What kind of psyche can emerge from such extermination? Will anyone who survives be able to recover?

The wounds inflicted on our souls cannot be captured by news bulletins, nor measured by statistics. They are devastating losses, lodged deep in the core of our humanity.

I ran into a friend on the street, once a university professor before this genocidal war. His face was pale, and his clothes looked as though they hadn’t been changed in months. His expression bore the weight of a lifetime of burdens. 

I greeted him: “How are you?” It was a banal, hollow question, just to start a conversation. He replied: “Our dignity has been humiliated. We live in a time where thieves and looters thrive, while the honourable die of hunger and despair.”

My friend captured reality precisely in that one sentence. Society here is being re-engineered according to a deliberate policy crafted by occupying authorities.

Continue reading at https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/hunger-looting-and-lost-childhoods-gazas-engineered-collapse

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Immediate Action Needed to Ensure Independent International Oversight in Israeli Prisons and Detention Centers by Addameer, Al-Haq, Al-Mezan, Palestinian Centre for Human Rights

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

Israeli authorities held Palestinian residents of Gaza separately from other Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Many are being held in ad hoc, army-administered detention camps, primarily situated in the Naqab desert in southern Israel. Testimonies from released prisoners indicate that the torture inflicted on Gaza detainees has reached unprecedented levels. During their abduction and detention, Palestinian residents of Gaza are treated as ‘human animals’, demonstrating that the dehumanizing and genocidal rhetoric used by the highest levels of the Israeli leadership to characterize Palestinians was embraced throughout all ranks within the military and the IPS. 

Our organizations maintain that the actual number of Palestinians who have “died” while in Israeli custody is much higher than the documented cases suggest. This assertion is grounded in the dozens of testimonies from released prisoners collected by our organizations and other civil society organizations. These testimonies include accounts from tortured detainees who witnessed other fellow detainees being beaten to death. 

Continue reading at https://pchrgaza.org/en/immediate-action-needed-to-ensure-independent-international-oversight-in-israeli-prisons-and-detention-centers/

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Gaza Strip: States are obliged to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide by UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

PLEASE TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW AND SEND YOUR LETTER TO THE UN OFFICE OF THE SPECIAL ADVISER ON THE PREVENTION OF GENOCIDE AND THE INTERNATIONAL CRIMINAL COURT PROSECUTOR.

The catastrophic humanitarian crisis in the occupied Gaza Strip, it said, raised serious concerns regarding the obligation of Israel and other State parties to prevent crimes against humanity and genocide.

The Committee also voiced its grave concerns about the racist hate speech, incitement to violence and genocidal actions, as well as dehumanising rhetoric targeted at Palestinians since 7 October 2023 by Israeli senior government officials, Parliament members, politicians and public figures.

Continue reading at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/gaza-strip-states-are-obliged-to-prevent-crimes-against-humanity-and-genocide-un-committee-stresses-dec21-2023/

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In the belly of Israel’s Holocaust ‘memory monster’ by Steve France

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The narrator does not define the monster but what the death-camp trauma-drama has done to the students’ minds is monstrous: Despite their acting out rituals of grief and mourning, they come away from his tours repulsed by their ancestors, the victims of a horrific genocide, whose murderers they are pumped up to emulate, as they confront the Arabs, whom they see as their enemy.

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2020/10/in-the-belly-of-israels-holocaust-memory-monster/

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Genocide supporter may get top job at Israel Holocaust memorial by Ali Abunimah

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The UN Genocide Convention defines genocide as any of a number of inhuman acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”
Under the convention, the crime of genocide includes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide.”
If anything fits this description it is Eitam’s record of dehumanizing Palestinians as “evil” and as “animals” and calling for their mass killing and expulsion from their homeland.
Thus, we will soon find out if Israel will be putting a genocidaire in charge of its Holocaust memorial.

Continue reading at https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/genocide-supporter-may-get-top-job-israel-holocaust-memorial

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On Hanging from the Blades of a Bulldozer: Al-Naem is Every Palestinian by Ramzy Baroud

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

“Israel has the right to defend itself” is the typical retort emanating from Washington and its western allies, and now, even by some Arabs. Translation: Israel has the right to oppress and besiege Palestinians, to disrupt any sense of normalcy in their life, to deny them food and medicine, to block every entrance and every exit, to trap them for eternity; Israel also has the right to kill anyone who dares challenge this inhumane paradigm, and, when it chooses, to dangle his or her corpse from the blades of a bulldozer, so that it can restate the rules of the game over and over again.
Political science cannot help us much here, but history can. The humiliation of the Palestinians is part and parcel of an Israeli historical discourse that has dehumanized the Palestinians to the extent that during the genocidal war of 2014, Israelis gathered to watch the onslaught in Gaza, dancing and barbecuing and cheering every time white phosphorous came raining down on hapless Palestinians.

Continue reading at http://www.palestinechronicle.com/on-hanging-from-the-blades-of-a-bulldozer-al-naem-is-every-palestinian/

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What the ‘Irish famine’ genocide teaches us about Palestine by Avigail Abarbanel

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Dehumanization is a common tactic all colonizers and settler-colonizers have been using throughout human history. All colonizers and genocidal regimes convince themselves (and all the bystanders out there) that they are not committing any crime, that in killing millions of their fellow human beings they are in fact doing something virtuous, essential and even godly. It is necessary to dehumanize victims so the job of harming, killing and displacing them is not only made easier but is in fact possible at all. Most people would not harm one another when they feel empathy and relate to each other’s experience… We see one such case unfolding in Palestine right in front of our noses and no one is doing anything about it. 

Continue reading at https://mondoweiss.net/2019/01/genocide-teaches-palestine/

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Nassir the latest in a long line of Palestinian child victims of Israel by Ramzy Baroud

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

The US-Israeli propaganda machine has not just targeted Palestinian fighters or factions, but has also done its utmost to dehumanize, and thus justify the killing of, Palestinian children too. “Children as young as eight turned into bombers, shooters, stabbers,” reported one Adam Kredo in the Washington Free Beacon, citing a “new report on child terrorists and their enablers.” This is not simply bad journalism, but part of a calculated Israeli campaign aimed at preemptively justifying the killings of children such as Nassir and Mohammed, and hundreds more like them.

It is that same ominous discourse that resulted in the call for genocide made by none other than Israel’s Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked, when she also called for the slaughter of Palestinian mothers who give birth to “little snakes.”

Continue reading at http://www.arabnews.com/node/1384431

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The Fear of Palestinian Existence by Denijal Jegić

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.

Fear has consistently shaped Zionism’s approach towards the indigenous Palestinians. As Palestinians have been blamed for merely standing in the way of the colonizer, their removal which has entailed multidimensional policies of ethnic cleansing and genocide, has been rhetorically rationalized through Orientalist transformations of Palestinians from the original owners of the land into “Islamist” terrorists. While Palestinians face a multitude of structural and physical violence, reoccurring culminations of Israeli aggressions resulting in the mass production of Palestinian death have repeatedly highlighted the always-already dehumanized position of Palestinians in the Western political and public sphere.

Continue reading at http://www.palestinechronicle.com/fear-palestinian-existence/

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Yes, Palestinians under siege are ‘dehumanised’ – by Israel by Nada Elia

Please TAKE ACTION RIGHT NOW and send your letter to the UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor.
“The long-standing dominant narrative about Palestinians is that we are an expendable people, one whose rights can be trampled with impunity, whose lives don’t matter, because we are lesser beasts on two legs, essentially prone to violence, motivated above all by hatred.
… What does he include under the term ‘humanity’?” the reporter persists. “The ability to see the other, his pain. It will be very difficult to restore the Gazans’ humanity, because they are occupied with their survival, they are concentrated on themselves. They don’t see the other. They themselves have lost control over their sense of feeling, their whole behavior has become a form of acting out.”
I do not want to minimise the severity of daily life in Gaza. I am someone who has insisted the siege be recognised as genocidal. Nevertheless, I am appalled at the callousness of the interviewer as she asks for an elaboration of how people in Gaza have lost their “internal morality,” their very “humanity”.

Continue reading at http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/israels-apologists-and-dehumanising-palestinians-167270044