Dispatch #157 White Lesbian Age 72 Considers the Utterly Lawless Behavior of Two Nuclear-Armed Rogue Nations with Billions for Weapons to Wage Genocide & War on Neighbors
- Kathleen A. Maloy
- Dec 22, 2024
- 4 min read
December 22nd 2024 1431 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President
29 Days White Supremacist Misogynist Christian Nationalist Regime Begins
911 Days Since SCOTUS Ruled American Women Don’t Have Human Rights
442 Days Since Israel Began Genocidal Assault on Palestinians in Gaza
For almost 15 months I have written about the Israel’s savage campaign of genocide in Gaza. More than 2 million people, 50% being children, are defenseless and trapped inside the Gaza strip, subjected to relentless bombings, drone attacks, starvation, lack of medical care, water, electricity, housing, and sanitation. The US is a full partner in these horrific violations of international law and humanitarian law, this dismantlement of a rules-based international order.
Every single day for 442 days, ever more egregious behaviors by Israel and the US are normalized and barely acknowledged in mainstream media. The stench of hypocrisy and arrogance of imperialism are tolerated by Western allies. Months of protests across the US and across the world have no impact. Rulings by the International Court of Justice and arrest warrants from the Internation Criminal Court are ridiculed and disregarded.
Israel relentless and casually bombs Lebanon cities, villages, and civilians. As the Assad regime falls, Israel massively bombs multiple sites in Syria and steals more Syrian land in the Golan Heights. The US fully enables Israel’s rampage across the Middle East – no atrocity is beyond the pale, no carnage is too horrific. hundreds of thousands of children killed, maimed, orphaned, permanently traumatized – lost generations – discarded without notice.
I am taking a needed break from these Dispatches. Perhaps it was this article -- Targeted aid killings: How Israel starved a population and sowed chaos in northern Gaza | Riley Sparks, Hajar Harb, Omar Nabil Abdel Hamid and Eric Reidy| Mondoweiss | 3 December 2024 – that tipped the balance.
Earlier this year, as northern Gaza hurtled towards famine under Israeli bombardment and siege, UN agencies undertook an emergency effort to try to deliver food aid safely to hundreds of thousands of people on the brink of starvation.
To secure deliveries, the agencies – including the World Food Programme (WFP) and the UN’s aid coordination body, OCHA – turned to the local Palestinian community, which formed emergency committees composed of members of prominent families and tribes, and other volunteers. For a few days in mid-March, the system worked. UN convoys brought significant amounts of food aid into parts of northern Gaza that had been cut off since near the start of the war, without the looting or Israeli attacks and interference that had been impeding humanitarian relief efforts for months.
But then – less than 48 hours after the first successful delivery – an Israeli airstrike on 18 March hit a warehouse used to store aid for the initiative, killing two people working there. Over the next two weeks, in what appears to be a series of targeted strikes on individuals and key distribution points, the Israeli military went on to kill more than 100 Palestinians – those involved in the effort and, in many cases, family members and civilians who just happened to be nearby. These repeated attacks forced the committees to back out, effectively crippling the plan, which came during a critical period in northern Gaza when children were dying of malnutrition and dehydration on an almost daily basis.
Our committees were subjected to direct Israeli bombing, despite the UN informing us that they were in constant contact with Israel and that they were providing them with the coordinates of our presence and the details of our role,” said Yahya al-Kafarna, 60, a leader of a prominent family in northern Gaza. “The committees were targeted anyway, and a number of us were killed.” https://mondoweiss.net/2024/12/targeted-aid-killings-how-israel-starved-a-population-and-sowed-chaos-in-northern-gaza/
This 21st Century scorched earth/torched people approach to waging war results in both unparalleled levels of human suffering and never before seen drug resistant pathogens. Yeah, I suppose one might be reminded of the infamous “chickens coming home to roost” phrase spoken by Malcolm X after the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy. It turns out that when one indiscriminately destroys every vestige of infrastructure necessary for life, bad shit happens and spreads far and wide.
Modern Warfare Is Breeding Deadly Superbugs. Why? Researchers are trying to understand why resistant pathogens are so prevalent in the war-torn nations of the Middle East. | Francesca Mari | New York Times | 2 December 2024.
By 2050, The Lancet predicts that antimicrobial resistance will kill 8.22 million people per year, more than the number currently killed by cancer. (For context, Covid claimed an estimated three million lives during all of 2020.) And a growing body of research suggests that the 21st-century way of warfare has become a major driver of that spread. Nations of the Middle East, like Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, now suffer from particularly high rates of multidrug-resistant pathogens, and some of the world’s most fearsome superbugs have incubated in the region — Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, E. coli, MRSA and perhaps most notably A. baumannii, a strain of Acinetobacter that traveled home with U.S. soldiers, where it became nicknamed “Iraqibacter.”
Humans are host to more than a thousand species of bacteria, including many of the superbugs deemed critical threats by the World Health Organization. But they rarely become pathogenic in healthy people. War changes that. It deprives people of food, clean water and sanitary living conditions. When bombs and bullets fly, the resulting wounds become perforated with shrapnel, debris and soil teeming with microbes. The injured and vulnerable often wind up in close and unclean quarters — packed transport buses and boats, refugee camps, overcrowded hospitals — that allow infection to fester and spread.
As wealthier countries bomb poorer ones, devastating essential infrastructure, they have created the tragic social conditions that foster antibiotic resistance. The public-health fallout knows no borders and can carry on indefinitely, even after the bombs stop.
“This is the dark poetics of it,” Dewachi [researcher] told me. World War II, he pointed out, is what gave the world penicillin, but now the 21st century’s brutal modes of conflict have brought all our means of fighting infection to the breaking point. The innovations of war, such as they are, have outpaced those of medicine, which has brought us to a grim possibility: Born in war, antibiotics now risk becoming another of its casualties.
Comments