During today’s White House press briefing, Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah continued the Trump administration’s streak of utterly appalling comments and doubled down on the president’s wanton disregard for human life when he dismissed the massacre of over sixty Palestinian protesters and the injuring of nearly 3,000 today by the Israeli Defense Forces as nothing but “propaganda.”
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Here's that horrific moment where Raj Shah calls 55 dead Palestinians and nearly 3,000 injured an 'unfortunate propaganda attempt' by Hamas pic.twitter.com/b5auF8Z1va
— Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani (@AdrienneMahsa) May 14, 2018
By any measure, the behavior of the IDF towards the protesters in Gaza is an egregious violation of human rights and a crime against humanity that the United States is not only just complicit in but now openly supportive of.
But that doesn’t seem to be too much of a problem for most people. At the time of press, only one out of a hundred sitting U.S. Senators has found the moral courage to denounce the appalling violence: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Over 50 killed in Gaza today and 2,000 wounded, on top of the 41 killed and more than 9,000 wounded over the past weeks. This is a staggering toll. Hamas violence does not justify Israel firing on unarmed protesters.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 14, 2018
The people of Gaza are essentially trapped in an enormous open-air prison, with all entrances and exits controlled by the Israelis with an iron fist. Stripped of their rights, their autonomy, and trapped in increasingly poor material conditions, the protests and the rushing of the wall are the desperate acts of an oppressed minority crying out for relief – and instead, they are slaughtered en masse by American-taxpayer bought bullets.
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Reporter Ryan Cooper summed up the plight of the Gazan people in this painful excerpt:
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As a result [of the Israeli blockade], the Gazan economy has all but collapsed. Unemployment is nearly 30 percent, over half the population doesn’t have enough to eat, fresh water is running out, and all its medical facilities are severely short of supplies. Gazans get only a few hours of electricity a day at most, and famine is staved off only with international aid and a tiny trickle of supplies from Israel. The United Nations predicts that on its current trajectory, by about 2020 Gaza will reach a comprehensive humanitarian crisis.
Entirely at the mercy of the Israelis, the people of Gaza are letting their frustration out – and are being butchered for daring to do so, with the blessing of the United States.
The Donald Trump administration has made it painfully clear that the liberal fantasy of the United States being a bastion of peace and a defender of human rights is just that – a myth that liberals use to assuage their guilty consciences.
We’ve reached the point in the authoritarian timeline when mass killings are being dismissed as “fake news” – and that should provoke cries of outrage ten times as loud as the pearl-clutching over the joke about John McCain’s impending death.
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