By Lasantha Pethiyagoda –

Prof (Emeritus) Lasantha Pethiyagoda

Little boys whose hands and parts of their face or torso are being blown off from booby-trapped cans of food that soldiers had left behind for starving children; soldiers who leave behind, poisoned food for a starving people to eat, booby-trapped toys that explode when excited children picked them up are promoted as the world’s most moral army.

The harm they have been doing is diabolical, and yet, they expect you to believe they are the victims. Invoking a long-forgotten holocaust and screaming discrimination, they expect you to suspend fundamental human reason to believe that the daily sniping of children with so called “kill shots” to the head or chest and the bombing of entire neighbourhoods that bury families alive and wipe out whole bloodlines is self-defence and just.

They want you to believe that a young man who had not eaten a thing in several days, who kept fighting even when all he had was one functioning arm, that this man was motivated by some innate subhuman savagery and irrational hatred or jealousy of an occupying oppressor, rather than the indomitable yearning to see at least their future generations free in their own ancestral homeland.

Children wander barefoot with empty pots; they gather the flesh of their parents into plastic bags; bury their siblings, cousins and friends’ remains lest they are scavenged by stray dogs or vultures; sneak out from their makeshift tents in the middle of the night to sleep on their parents’ graves; they often pray for death just to join their families and not be alone in this terrible world anymore, terrorized so utterly that children lose their hair, lose their memory, lose their minds, and those as young as 4 and 5 years old die of heart attacks or cancerous growths from drinking only polluted water and not having nutrition to ward off disease with grossly depleted immune systems.

The persistent stress of terror from predator drones, starvation, relentless bombing, lack of nutrients, make mothers deliver premature babies. Barely functioning hospitals having incubators with babies die, alone in hospital beds, crying until they could cry no more, and die, to decompose in the same places.

Soldiers habitually destroy scanners and other diagnostic equipment, pull out plugs from incubators or life-support systems and bury the witnesses alive in mass graves, handcuffed and beaten, still in their distinct medical garb.

With persistent international pressure, a trickle of wheat flour aid trucks are allowed into the enclave; the snipers and battle tanks wait until the starving people are lured into firing positions and are then systematically massacred when they are gathered to collect a handful of flour to prepare a day’s bread; some finally-allowed food delivery vehicle into a shelter for embedded journalists to document is then set fire to, that is the entire shelter and aid truck before anyone could taste the food.

Snipers gloatingly brag about blowing out 42 kneecaps in one day as one soldier did in 2019 well before the long-flogged date when we are made to believe everything began; a tank commander admitted to CNN that he ran over hundreds of starving women and children with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads as evidence of his crime.

The soldiers systematically rape doctors, patients, and other captives with hot metal rods, jagged and electrified sticks, even fire extinguishers, sometimes raping to death, as happened with precious surgeons and others.

Innocent women are forced to give birth in the filth of dirty floors, on urine and faeces-soaked clothes, get Caesarean-section deliveries or limb amputations without anaesthesia as medical aid trucks are prevented from entering.

The children are targeted by remote drone operators who shoot them in the head or chest and later the soldiers decorate armoured tanks with their toys. Killed or displaced women’s lingerie are worn by the soldiers and photos taken, proudly posted on their social media for the world to see.

Imagine if the oppressors had been subjected to their homes being stolen over the last eighty years, expelling owners whose ancestors for many centuries lived there; imagine if more than an estimated ten percent of their population had been exterminated in under two years; bombed every hospital, university, library, museum, cultural centre, place of worship, and simultaneously set up an observation platform where the actual oppressor people came to watch their slaughter like a tourist attraction, what would your reaction be?

The besieged people are corralled by the hundreds of thousands into flimsy tents with no protection from extreme weather, no access to sanitation or water, then daily bombed in so called safe zones, often burned alive with incendiary munitions while being cut off from access to food and medicine, deliberately obliterating agricultural land and nurseries.

If the world were watching the livestreamed systematic annihilation of the oppressor in real time, there would be no debating whether that constituted terrorism or genocide, and the mere notion of an affront to them would receive howls of indignation and horror from all over Europe and north America.

And yet we, the “Other” must do just that, enduring the indignity of debating those who still like to think that the victims’ only life choices should be to leave their homeland, in what they quaintly call “voluntary” migration, submit to the supremacy of their tormentors, or die politely and quietly by the tens of thousands.

But Western readers of my words would be wrong to think that I write to convince you of anything that is framed outside of your entrenched worldview. The recent toothless UN general assembly resolution, though well-meaning and appreciated, is of little consequence in the midst of this holocaust of our time.

I write in the spirit of intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, both of whom have extensively studied the history of this human tragedy defying finely dressed well-spoken evil monsters who harbour the same supremacist ideologies as any other European settler colonizer, and these notions of entitlement and privilege, of being divinely favoured, blessed, or chosen according to ancient text books.

If you still believe the western media narratives you have crossed all ethical lines and nurtured the most vile of human impulses. But the rest of the world is finally glimpsing the terror we have endured at your blatantly false narratives for so long, and they are seeing the reality of who you are, who you’ve always been. They watch in utter astonishment the sadism, the glee, the joy, and pleasure with which you conduct, watch, and cheer the daily details of breaking innocent bodies, innocent minds, factual history and therefore, our future.