Netanyahu echoes Kipling on ‘the white man’s burden’
A threat of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court didn’t stop Benjamin Netanyahu from being welcomed rapturously on July 24 by the U.S. Congress. Over 300 senators and representatives obscenely applauded the serial killer 39 times, of which 23 were standing ovations.
Journalist Ben Norton estimated that the total applause time for the bloody war criminal exceeded 10 minutes. That’s the sort of reception that Hitler got from his Reichstag deputies.
Those members of Congress were cheering the deaths of at least 40,000 Palestinians, including 15,000 children. The actual figure may be much higher. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, as many as 186,000 or more people have been killed.
As Netanyahu spoke, Rashida Harbi Tlaib — the only Palestinian-American member of Congress — bravely held up a sign reading “war criminal” on one side and “guilty of genocide” on the other.
Meanwhile, outside the U.S. Capitol, police used pepper spray on people protesting the slaughter. Tens of thousands came to Washington, D.C., on a workday to say “NO!” to this genocide. Many were from Arab and Muslim communities.
Netanyahu called these protesters “Iran’s useful idiots.” How gracious of the Zionist leader — whose apartheid state has been showered with over $300 billion in U.S. tax money — to attack demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech.
They included American Postal Workers Union president Mark Diamondstein, who is Jewish. He spoke at the rally, demanding a ceasefire.
There was a large labor contingent at the July 24 march. The APWU and six other unions, representing 6 million members, wrote a letter to Biden demanding that military aid to Israel be cut off.
The mass murder of Palestinians is being carried out with more than $12 billion in weapons supplied by Genocide Joe Biden over the last nine months. Even in these inflationary times, that’s enough money to build apartments for 40,000 homeless families at $300,000 per unit.
Back to 1914
Netanyahu’s repulsive, lying speech was aimed at a Fox News audience of Trump supporters. While people are starving in Gaza, Netanyahu claimed that “every man, woman and child” there was getting more than “3,000 calories” a day.
The truth is that 96% of Gaza’s population is suffering from “crisis or worse levels of food insecurity,” according to the UN.
The Zionist leader was speaking directly to the military-industrial complex when he said, “We also keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”
Those “shared interests” belong to Big Oil and Wall Street banksters who loot trillions from Western Asia. The supremacy of the U.S. dollar as world money rests upon oil being sold in dollars.
Netanyahu was echoing former Secretary of State Alexander Haig, who declared that “Israel is the largest American aircraft carrier in the world that cannot be sunk.”
For the capitalist class, Israel represents what the world was like in 1914, before the Bolshevik, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions and liberation struggles erupted throughout Africa and Asia.
On April 20, 1914, over 20 people were killed by the Colorado National Guard in Ludlow. This atrocity occurred during a United Mine Workers strike against Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel & Iron. The Rockefellers were the founders of Big Oil.
The next day, April 21, 1914, the U.S. began a military occupation of Veracruz, Mexico. Hundreds of Mexicans were killed during the invasion.
That’s the world to which Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, wants to return. Musk attended the July 24 Capitol affair as a guest of Netanyahu.
It was the Musks that Netanyahu was addressing when he declared, “For the forces of civilization to triumph, America and Israel must stand together.” That’s the language of white supremacy. It’s claiming that Palestinians, all Arabs, and two billion Muslims are “uncivilized.”
Netanyahu’s speech was a modern version of the British poet Rudyard Kipling’s call to “take up the white man’s burden.” Kipling described Africans and Asians as “half devil and half child.”
The year after Kipling addressed his poem to Queen Victoria, the United States invaded the Philippines, killing at least a million Filipinos. In the same period, at least a hundred Black people were lynched every year.
That’s the nightmare that people in Gaza are living through today, a nightmare that’s being pushed back all over the earth.
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