“The Horror! The Horror!”

Life during the occupation was oddly enough involved spending many hours indoors as the occupiers of the city were very careful to suppress resistance movements. My mother was a child during the occupation and would often find herself playing in the blocks near her home when trucks with loudspeaker systems would come through the city blaring that curfew time was going into effect and to clear the streets. Curfew time sometimes came as early as 1:00 pm in the afternoon. As the occupation lasted many years this meant much time spent indoors. The time seemed to vary a lot depending on whether or not the resistance movement in the city had taken any actions against the occupiers in recent times.

She once found herself a little too far removed from home and did not make it back to the house before a watchman locked a gate to her building. She scaled a fence in her dress and found herself hung up on the spiked top of a fence. The next thing she knew was being pulled off of the fence by occupying soldiers. They laughed at her calling her a harmless small child. They had the watchman let her back into the house.
 
During the curfew time people had to keep quiet in the houses or the occupiers would fire their rifles in the air outside the homes as warning shots. The sounds of formations of troops outside the home could often be heard and they seemed to like to move their military convoys at night also. At night every crack in every window had to be covered in thick tarpaper to hide any light from getting outside and getting to fighter bombers that would visit at night going for arms plants. Again the occupiers patrolled the streets looking for the slightest light leaving any house or building.

Believe it or not, readers, but this is part of an eye-witness account from the German occupation of the Warsaw Ghetto from 1939-1943 and not from the current bombing and occupation of Gaza by the Israeli armed forces.
 
Can anyone tell me any essential difference from the Nazi philosophy of “Lebensraumpolitik” and the creeping annexation of Palestinian lands that started in 1948 by the Zionists?

Gaza

Warsaw

Just as the Nazis transported Jews to the labor and death camps such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, there are thousands of Palestinians rotting away in Israeli dungeon, illegally detained when officially there is no state of war between Palestine and Israel – simply and illegal occupation against the precepts of the Geneva Convention in Gaza and the West Bank.
 
Gaza is the world’s biggest open-air prison housing 1.8 million people with valuable natural oil and gas resources located off its coast. The slaughter of the present attack by F16 fighter bombers, tanks and shelling on a civilian population is no different from WWII or the carpet bombing of North Vietnam by the US Air Force in the 1960’s and 1970’s.
 
The US “concern” for the war crimes taking place in Gaza is paper thin as Congress just approved a further US$226 million to Israel to ensure that it continues to be well armed. How can a country the size of New Jersey have the second largest fleet of F16’s and be the fourth most powerful army and have 150 (Source: Jimmy Carter) nuclear bombs in Dimpna – just in case?
 
At the time of writing the body count in Gaza has risen to 1915 including 448 children according to UN observers. Injured and wounded could be ten times the actual number of fatalities as Israel inflicts collective punishment on and continues massacring the Gaza population in retaliation for rockets fired into its territory by “militants” as they are called in the corporate media. So far 13 Israelis have died – 10 of whom are army combatants.
 
The collective punishment is destroying the infrastructure of Gaza – almost 150 schools have been destroyed, 18 hospitals and around 5,500 buildings. I guess that Halliburton ad KBR will be contracted to rebuild this destruction as they were in Iraq?
 
The fact is that the “militants” are defending themselves from an illegal occupation of their territory and have the right to do so under international law no matter how this is manipulated in the western and especially US media. The many UN Resolution asking Israel to desist from this occupation have either been vetoed by the US on the Security Council or simply ignored by the Israeli government.
 
The Chimes of Slaughter show no signs of stopping in Gaza just as the Nazis did not stop in the Warsaw ghetto until it was razed to the ground with almost 57,000 Jewish Poles dead or transported to extermination camps.
 
What makes this slaughter worse is that Israeli civilians gather on hillsides near the town of Soderot to cheer the bombs landing in Gaza. Palestinians are being killed but what has been killed in Israel is decency and any sense of humanity as the people cheering regard the Palestinian victims as sub-human – sounds like Hitler’s philosophy in Mein Kampf, does it not?
 
We can do little to stop this mass murder but what we can do is make our readers aware of the horror and dedicate an anthem to those suffering, especially the children of Gaza who even if they survive the assault on their territory will be forever mentally scarred by Netanyahu’s adopted Nazi/Zionist policies.
 
Perhaps one of the greatest songs ever written in defense of human freedom was “Chimes of Freedom” composed by Bob Dylan back in 1965. The lyrics are just as pertinent today as during the Vietnam War or the Warsaw Ghetto. We present a live version performed by Bruce Springsteen rather than the better known versions by Dylan himself or the Byrds as the arrangement and depth of sound is far more “epic” and fitting for the people of Gaza.
 
The lyrics are at the bottom of the video in English with a translation in Spanish for our Latino readers.
 
Dedicated to the people of Gaza!