Make no mistake. Israel has committed massive crimes in Gaza and in the West Bank against the Palestinians. When will the thousands killed get justice? Or are we all supposed to just go on with our lives and pretend that it’s all the pursuit of “the right of self-defense?” Who are these IDF snipers who anonymously shoot children, and no one is even curious to know who these killers are? Is this the way of war now, according to the “international rules based order” that we should be so proud of in the West, which is supposedly the hallmark of our “civilization?”
A day of reckoning will come. There are good men and women who are wokring to make that a reality.
And what are we to make of our politcal class that utters not a peep about the slaughter that Netanyahu is doing, but who earlier could not get the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for President Putin fast enough, because Putin was assumed to have “kidnapped” Ukrainian orphans that they might have a decent life in Russia. But Netanyahu can kill as many children as he wants, since that is not a crime according to the “rule of law,” so the “jurists” at the ICC stay busy identifying “Russian crimes” that might be spotted at the backs of their cereal boxes.
Kurt Tucholsky was paraphrasing a French joke when he observed that “the death of one person: that’s a catastrophe. One hundred thousand dead: that’s a statistic!”
What Israel has done for over a month in Gaza is now a matter of statistics, for they have killed over 15,000 so far, more than 4000 of them children. It is the Palestinian Holocaust, because there are many more thousands buried under all those pancaked buildings where people once lived. And now that the Israeli assault continues, many thousands more will die.
Given these grim statistics, it becomes more and more important to remember the one person, rather than mention in passing the vast number of the now faceless thousands dead.
One such person was Elham Farah, a Christian Palestinian, living in Gaza, where she had taught music all her life. She was 84 years old and was the daughter of the Palestinian poet, Hannah Farah.
On November 12, 2023, an Israeli sniper shot her in the leg, as she came out of the Holy Family Church in Gaza City, where she had been sheltering to escape the bombing. She wanted to make sure that her home had not been hit. A sniper was waiting who are trained to shoot in the leg.
Those inside the church tried to rescue her, as she cried out for help, but people were afraid of Israeli snipers who long have had a reputation for being merciless. Elham Farah bled to death over several days. No one came to help her because of the sniping. She had just survived the bombing of Saint Porphyrios, the 850-year-old church in Gaza, which took the lives of 18 other Christians. Is such a death for a gentle old lady acceptable to those who see themselves as “civilized?” And why no one even knows about the crimes of Israeli snipers is unimaginable.
The hell unleashed by the Herod of our time in the Holy Land escapes the mind’s ability to describe horror—to see little children torn apart by bombs, dropped by pilots in their sophisticated flying machines is beyond the reach of words…
Then Herod perceiving that he was deluded by the wise men, was exceeding angry: and sending killed all the menchildren that were in Bethlehem, and in all the borders thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.
Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremias the prophet, saying:
A voice in Rama was heard, lamentation and great mourning; Rachel bewailing her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not (Matthew 2:16-18).
“Rama” or “Ramah” is the name of several Palestinian towns, and “Rachel” stands in for all mothers whose children have been slaughtered by the powerful. Such killing was “righteous revenge” because the Hamas razzia of October 7th was fabricated as brutal, with beheaded babies and babies in ovens, when it was the IDF that did most of the slaughter of Israelis that day. Why the need to lie by Israel? The full truth about what really happened on October 7th is now coming out: Hamas killed IDF soldiers in combat. It was not a “terrorist” attack:
Thus on October 7th:
- The IDF killed anything that moved;
- Many Israeli captives were still alive, two days after October 7;
- Israelis were killed by the IDF with heavy shelling of houses and cars;
- Most of the civilian deaths happened because of the IDF;
- It was a razzia by Hamas because most of the captives taken were IDF officers.
And in the West, we have the war enthusiasts, eagerly cheering on Netanyahu and his ilk to kill more, to kill without compunction, for there will be no red lines drawn, because Israel is for “civilization,” because that is how you fight wars, by killing as many babies as you can with bombs.
Perhaps in the months or even years ahead, there will come a time for a “Nuremberg Trial” for the murderers that are now in power in Israel—and for the IDF soldiers snipers who shot down Elham Farah and the two liitle Christian Palestinian boys, and also for the many “journalists” and “scholars” who justified and whitewashed the crimes against humnaity now permanently recorded for the world to see. Remember, they did hang Julius Streicher, even though he perosnally had killed no one.
C.B. Forde writes from rural Ontario, Canada.