Superfluous young men
That's the title of Martin Kramer's blog entry about his speech to the Herzliya Conference recently.
MJ Rosenberg (former AIPAC employee) and others have called his speech a call to genocide. Looking at the context i have to agree.
"Never Again!", the cry heard after the crimes of the Nazi's were fully known, must be for everyone. If it is not for everyone, then what meaning does it have? If it is not for everyone, what hope do we, that is, all of us, have? It is absolutely the most important lesson of the 20th century. The only way we will collectively survive the 21st century is by supporting solidarity, by never being complacent when there are calls to rid the world of a people, by claiming they are "superfluous".
This is no small matter in a world brimming with nuclear weapons. It is a matter of our common survival.
Martin Kramer is a fellow at Harvard's National Security Studies program and also a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP, an aipac-affiliated "think tank"). Kramer is a Senior Fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center Institute for International and Middle East Studies. That's Adelson as in Sheldon Adelson, a gambling tycoon that is among the wealthiest men on the planet. Sheldon is a generous guy, in 2007 Adelson founded the lobbying group Freedom's Watch, an extremist group supporting US militarism anywhere and everywhere. Adelson is also said to have donated this building, to his friends at WINEP and AIPAC. So Kramer has some wealthy and influential friends. Let's look at his solution for the Palestinian problem. Using hunger as a weapon and imposed depopulation.
IN his own words:
Aging populations reject radical agenda and the Middle East is no different. Now eventually, this will happen among the Palestinians, too. But it will happen faster if the West stops providing pro-natal subsidies for Palestinians with refugee status. Those subsidies are one reason why in the ten years, from 1997 to 2007, Gaza's population grew by an astonishing 40%. At that rate, Gaza's population will double by 2030 to three million. Israel's present sanctions on Gaza have a political aim, undermine the Hamas regime, but they also break Gaza's runaway population growth and there is some evidence that they have. That may begin to crack the culture of martyrdom, which demands a constant supply of superfluous young men.
Fear of the other. I would say a pathological fear of Palestinians. This is not about ending "rewards" for having babies, this is about, given the context of Israel's military siege on the people of Gaza, preventing the means of physical and healthy survival of an entire population. There are no "pro-natal subsidies", there is aid to prevent actual starvation. Kramer is pushing what many see as Israel's current policy, imposing a hunger as a means of achieving political goals in Gaza. Already, malnutrition is rampant in Gaza. Humanitarian aid is severely restricted. Human Rights groups and humanitarian aid groups have been very vocal in condemning the siege. The siege is all about the collective punishment of the people of Gaza for their political rejection of Israel's occupation and continual oppression of the Palestinian people. Kramer simply wants to ramp up the pressure, and does not care about the language he uses, and certainly does not care about the real human cost of such policies.
This man does not belong at Harvard, where Kramer is presently a visiting scholar. It should not go without full refutation of these insidious calls for the destruction of another people. It is about all of us. An attack on one must be considered an attack on all of us.
Never Again.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Even an 10 year-old can understand this:
We have got to understand that the poor are all around us and we are ignoring them.
We have got to understand that these deaths are preventable.
We have got to understand that people in third world countries think and care and smile and cry just like us.
We have got to understand that they are us. We are them. - 10 year old Rachel Corrie, who was killed by the Occupation Army 13 years later
What we are seeing here, what we must respond to, is not just the indifference of people to the suffering of Gaza, but using hunger as part of directed, very deliberate policy. this is way beyond the evil of indifference. We must not be silent.
There is hope:
We are a group of German Jews who want to send a ship with goods and musical instruments to Gaza. We intend to cooperate with a European project that is sending supplies in the spring of 2010. We are acquiring a ship, loading it up in Germany, then picking up passengers (Jewish and non-Jewish, German and non-German) at a Mediterranean port.
Among the goods being shipped will be urgently needed things like medicines, baby food, bedding, children’s clothes, school materials; also painting equipment and especially musical instruments. We believe cement is not the only thing necessary for rebuilding – we call on our politicians to provide these urgently needed building materials! – but also things to help cure the soul. here.
This is the kind of thinking, the kind of actions, that will bring us closer to peace.