Quote Of The Week: “We Celebrate Our Religion, Our Nation, Our Identity, Our Superiority, By Negating And Erasing Yours.”

“Let the world denounce our genocide. What do we care? The billions in military aid flows unchecked from our American ally. The fighter jets. The artillery shells. The tanks. The bombs. An endless supply. We kill children by the thousands. We kill women and the elderly by the thousands. The sick and injured, without medicine and hospitals, die. We poison the water. We cut off the food. We make you starve. We created this hell. We are the masters. Law. Duty. A code of conduct. They do not exist for us… We laugh at your misery. We cheer your death. We celebrate our religion, our nation, our identity, our superiority, by negating and erasing yours.”

The above quote is from author and former New York Times Middle East Bureau Chief, Chris Hedges, from his journalistic lament, Israel’s Willing Executioners.

This is the sadistic methodology and ideology of both Israel and the United States, two countries joined at the hip by their genocidal-colonial hegemony, their inability or refusal to learn from history and their infallible belief in white supremacy and religious ascendancy. Today, the faces of this global massacre are Joe Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu. But make no mistake, while they are the commanding perpetrators and leading disseminators of these crimes – and have been for decades – they are also nothing more than the figureheads of a massive beast that openly feeds on the denigration, subjugation and suffering of others. The beast profits from it, both monetarily and in its sense of worldly and otherworldly dominance. It goes by many names: neoliberalism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, zionism, authoritarianism, fascism, totalitarianism… The list is long and its hallmarks are apartheid, genocide, poverty, starvation, inequality, mass-incarceration, humiliation and death.

We who remain silent or in denial feed the beast. We are the ones who set it free. The ones who offer it a sacrifice of other, so long as it isn’t us. But it is always us in the end. The beast has no loyalty. It devours. It finds pride in its own sickness, its own intolerance. Wherever it goes, the beast leaves an ocean of blood and a mountain of flesh. It elates in its ability to service fear, trauma, horror and control.

Those of us who continue to empower this beast through whatever acts of cognitive dissonance allow us to vote for, excuse, deny or even advocate for this all-too-human monstrosity, become its willing servants. But it’s only a matter of time before our blood fills those oceans and our bodies reinforce those mountains. We consume and are consumed. All in the duplicitous and violent name of democracy and freedom.