H@RD TRUTHS BY GHK LALL – Palestine – a searching indictment of the so-called free world

Jan 18, 2024 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Oh, they like to tell us coloured people about human rights.  But only when it suits their plans.  Just as sweetly, they fall over themselves to educate us about the Rights of the Child.  But in Palestine that has been thrown out of the top floor window, with all the dead babies and deceased infants, and toddlers who are no more.  Indeed, they, the people of the great and noble civilizations, are the best at informing us, the backward wretched of the earth, about the beauty of modernity, and the ideals of democracy, and the enduring power of self-determination.  But not when their interests are under siege, or their allies and friends are on the warpath.

I absorb the battering and devastations that are piled on the Palestinians with ruthless efficiency, and I say why not them, why not there?  How come not for those people (yes, those people) for all those lustrous essences, those inspiring imperatives, that are inseparable from the conduct of men of morality, leaders with some semblance of truth in them, and people who know what it is to suffer for age after age?  Why do the Palestinians not count in pristine Western considerations?  I want to scream and cry, but something peculiar crept into the psyche, something that has been banished for the longest time now.  There is the impulse to strike at something, at somebody; to shake some fairness out of them.  I come to my senses and retreat.  Calm returns, and it is a preternatural one.

What is going on over Palestine is more than hypocrisy of the rankest kind.  It is a vulgarity powered by an obscenity that has metamorphosed into the grimmest of tragedies.  The Rwandan genocide of 800,000 dead took all of 100 days, but there was a difference.  There were some elements of the obscure about it.  After all, as our white brothers have indoctrinated us, it is the Dark heart of Africa, isn’t it?  So, what else was there to expect from people whose eyeteeth were cut on savagery.  Well, I would be grateful for the enlightenment-any kind and any amount-about what to call what is happening in Palestine.  It is butchery and barbarity rolled into one, plain and simple.  The Guardians of Guyana’s Democracy should hold up a placard or two in the face of those US military men when they come here with their selling points on how to save us from Venezuela and Maduro.

America has the key to contain the rampaging Israelis.  America has seen it fit to toss that key aside slyly, when it believed that the rest of the world is not paying attention.  Unlike the machete butchery of Rwanda, the savagery of Israeli brutality is a military magnum opus, one that is being played out in full view of a knowing world.  A silent world.  A shameless world.  Not one global citizen can claim illiteracy on what has unfolded and now rages in a most one-sided battle between the Israelis and Palestinians.  The Old Testament has been turned on its head: look who is David, and check who is Goliath.  In this instance, the Palestinians have some defenders, but they themselves are without so much as slingshots.  Meanwhile, the Israelis have transformed into an extension of the American war machine. They have also mutated into an expression of that same war machine of my adopted brothers.  I must check my hands to see if I can smell the blood of people like me on them.  In Guyana, they used to delight to tell me that I don’t understand local politics.  I suppose in America, the word would be that he doesn’t understand big power politics, with its big visions and big games.  Who is used, and who is abused?

While all of this makes the rounds in one form or another, and from one small Third World voice or the other, the likes of Secretary Blinken comfort themselves and their consciences with platitudes and inanities.  Perhaps, I should go the length of the field and say with their copyrighted asininities.  My conclusion is that at times like these, those who ascribe the best in civility to themselves are as primitive as those with grass skirts, who still relish the practice of cannibalism, and whose linguistic development is as guttural and one-dimensional as a frog.

UN Security Council, and now the ICJ, have been hauled into the maelstrom and quagmire that is Palestine.  Do not expect any resolution from the latter in favour of those being victimized and brutalized.  Ah, we must learn to manage our expectations, not to set them too high.  For then, the fall is too long, and all the more unbearable for the drop.  A little while back, the chic chatter was about the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’  I wonder what kind of convenient label the Israeli-Palestinian special military operation would end up being called.  We have been told again and again about the vast gulf that separates the First World from the Third.  I urge one and all to peer closely into Palestine, and tell the world who is barbarian, who operates a killing machine.  Study how Gaza and its surroundings have deteriorated into a killing field of innocents, a testing ground for the outpouring of primeval instincts.  The sophistications that separate First from Third have all evaporated. The revelations are that all are savages in the flesh.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• GHK Lall, H@rd Truths, Palestine, Rights of the Child, world

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