Saturday, February 17: International Law Isn't Real
It's fugayzi, it's fugahzi, it's a wozzy, it's a woozy, it's fairy dust. It does not exist.
Yesterday, the top UN court rejected South Africa’s request for an urgent measure to safeguard Rafah, further cementing the legacy of the UN as a money and reputation-laundering scam organized and operated by western governments. The International Court of Justice that we all thought might make a positive impact has instead doubled down on its inaction, saying that Palestinians are indeed enduring severe harm but failing to provide any additional security measures or new orders to stop the genocide.
This op-ed in the LA Times was written by an American doctor named Irfan Galaria who traveled to Gaza and witnessed the horrors of genocide first-hand. Unsurprisingly, Galaria describes stomach-churning scenes of what he saw, which he describes not as war, but as annihilation:
“I stopped keeping track of how many new orphans I had operated on. After surgery they would be filed somewhere in the hospital, I’m unsure of who will take care of them or how they will survive. On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”
Every new story or interview that comes out reveals fresh new horrors that we hadn’t previously imagined. All the while, our elected representatives try to find anything to distract us from the carnage. Unions representing approximately 9 million American workers announced "The National Labor Network for Ceasefire", which includes the postal workers union, the national nurses union, the auto workers union, and over 200 other labor groups.
The sad fact is that the violence and bloodshed we’re seeing on a daily basis in Gaza is only part of the reason for our growing societal depression. Of course watching our fellow human beings getting massacred in the most painful ways imaginable with complete impunity by an unrepentant apartheid state is upsetting. What is also upsetting us is the mass realization that the people tasked with 'representing' us politically only really represent money and power, and that the wishes of millions of us are of no actual consequence to them.
What we’ve seen in the past four months has been atrocity after atrocity, but it’s always important to emphasize that while the scale of destruction is unprecedented, the crimes are not. The following poignant quote from Edward Said could’ve been written this week, but it was actually included in a book he published three months after I was born…32 years ago.
"For Zionism, the Palestinians have now become the equivalent of a past experience reincarnated in the form of a present threat. The result is that the Palestinians’ future as a people is mortgaged to that fear, which is a disaster for them and for Jews."
-Edward Said
Side Items
Broke Boy Trump: A judge in New York ordered former president Trump and his companies to pay $355 million in fines, plus interest, after ruling that Trump had manipulated his net worth in financial statements. Allow me to be the first to point out that this bozo isn’t paying a dime. This court ruling, much like all of his others, will ultimately result in nothing but more headlines that paint the orange fool as some sort of renegade