The CBS national newscast on Jan. 20 showed the terrible anguish of a father holding a photograph of a little girl who had been killed a few days short of her first birthday by an Israeli bomb in Gaza.
This father and another little daughter had just been pulled out of the rubble, fortunate to still be alive.
Unfortunately, the dead little girl’s mother, brother, another sister and three of her uncles had all been killed in Israel’s massive bombing campaign.
According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israel dropped 25,000 tons of bombs on the Gaza Strip in the first month of the slaughter, equivalent to two nuclear bombs.
As of Jan. 21, the Health Ministry said 25,105 Palestinians have been killed and 62,681 have been wounded. Reuters reported that 178 were killed on the 21st, which it described as “one of the deadliest days of the war thus far.”
The U.N. estimated that 16,000 of the deaths have been women and children. The head of the U.N. called the killing of civilians and mass destruction in Gaza “unprecedented.”
Israel’s bombing campaign has been so massive, so extensive, that it has now gone far beyond anything that could possibly be justified under any concept of just war.
Columnist Patrick Foy wrote on the Lew Rockwell website, www.lewrockwell.com, on Jan. 19: “You don’t hear any objections from the U.S. Senate regarding whatever Israel does, no matter how outrageous.”
He added: “The U.S. Senate has been bought and paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which is a front organization. AIPAC should logically be registered as a foreign agent, a lobbying agent for foreign government.”
Prime Minister Netanyahu said in a press conference a few days ago that Israel must have a prime minister who “needs to be capable of saying no to our friends…,” rejecting the U.S. policy of a two-state solution. The U.S. gives Israel $3.8 billion in no-strings attached foreign aid every year and billions more in other bills, in spite of the fact that Israel has been in much better financial shape than the U.S. for many years.
Many foreign policy experts over the past few months have said Israel could not continue this war without U.S. assistance.
The conservative Judge Andrew Napolitano, on his podcast “Judging Freedom”, has been leading a fight against this war and has had several experts on his program who have said President Biden could stop the fighting with one phone call.
However, Biden is just too weak. While Netanyahu said Israel needs a prime minister who can say no to the U.S., what this world needs now is a U.S. president strong enough to say no to Israel.
The only president who ever has was President Eisenhower when he rejected Israel’s demand for the U.S. to go to war with Egypt over control of the Suez Canal. And Eisenhower was courageous enough to do it on national television one week before the 1956 election, saying he would end U.S aid to Israel if it did not withdraw its troops.
Now, even 15 Jewish Democrats in the House and four in the Senate have criticized Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state solution.
When Netanyahu said, as he did in his press conference, that Israel had to have complete control of all land “from the river to the sea,” he was saying the same thing that some pro-Palestinian students have been kicked out of school for saying.
It is sad to me that all Congressional Republicans except for Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Thomas Massie have been too afraid of the Israel Lobby to even criticize all this bombing of little children.
The late great conservative columnist Charley Reese wrote in 2004: “I harbor no ill feelings toward Israel. In many ways it is an admirable country, but it is a foreign country, and the U.S. should treat Israel the same as it treats every other foreign nation. We should make it clear, for example, that Israel’s enemies are not our enemies… but we will go on spending treasure and blood in (the Middle East) until the American people elect some politician brave enough to face down the Israeli lobby.”
Reprinted with author’s permission from The Knoxville Focus.
John James Duncan Jr. is an American politician who served as the U.S. representative for Tennessee’s 2nd congressional district from 1988 to 2019. A lawyer, former judge, and former long serving member of the Army National Guard, he is a member of the Republican Party. He is a member of the Ron Paul Institute Advisory Board.
