#SwindonsSundaySermon: even murdering newborn twins isn’t a ‘red line’ for the West

The number of Palestinians murdered by Israel‘s attacks on Gaza since 7 October has surpassed 40,000. Nearly 16,500 of the victims of Israeli terrorism were just children.

Another 10,000 people are lying dead underneath hundreds and thousands of tonnes of rubble.

Israel: evaporating children with impunity

One Al Jazeera correspondent, Hani Mahmoud, suggested the 40,000 figure is “a very conservative reading of the number of casualties across Gaza”:

There are still those who are missing and trapped under the rubble, who haven’t been identified, haven’t been collected, haven’t been counted yet.

There are those who are missing, whose family members don’t know anything about their whereabouts. There are those who were evaporated, given the intensity and the scale of the bombs.

Evaporated. Wiped off the face of the earth for having the misfortune of being born in another part of the world to you and I.

Displaced children, bombed in their beds as they sleep in makeshift tents. Israel has already destroyed their homes. It was a dire situation long before 7 October 2023, but now it is a catastrophe, a humanitarian crisis, created in Washington and delivered by their colonial outpost in the Middle East.

The world is utterly complicit with the Israeli terrorist regime. If this happened in any European country — quite literally any — how would other countries react?

The damage unleashed by Israel’s relentless bombardments of the Gaza Strip and the undefinable toll of misery and suffering experienced by a hungry population, struggling to find safety in an area where there is no sanctuary to be found.

How would we react?

How would we react if this was happening in Paris, Madrid or Milan?

On average, Israel has killed about 130 humans every day in Gaza over the past 10 months. The unprecedented scale of the Israeli occupation military’s destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and places of worship is way beyond anything a majority of us have experienced in our lifetime.

How would we react if this was happening in Amsterdam, London or Brussels?

The accumulative effects of Israel’s barbaric war on Gaza could mean the true death toll could reach more than 186,000 human beings. War has indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from the violence itself, and it will continue to cause many indirect deaths in the coming weeks, months and years through life-ending diseases and the destruction of health facilities and food distribution centres.

How would we react if this was happening in Athens, Budapest or Vienna?

While we were distracted with a general election and the Farage-incited race riots that swept across England, Israel has gone about unleashing some of its most brutal aggressions to date.

Did anyone else notice how so many far-right rioters in England were also fanatical Israel supporters? Strange that.

The savagery is unfathomable

The horrific massacre at al-Tabin school in the Daraj neighbourhood in central Gaza City, this past week, condemned by the global south, claimed the lives of more than 100 innocent civilians, a majority of whom were women and children seeking shelter from the never ending cycle of violence.

Israel claimed the school was yet another Khamas “control and command centre”, without providing a single piece of evidence to support their ludicrously dishonest and repetitive assertions.

But this is a military that savagely massacred dozens of its own people on 7 October – witnessed by numerous Israeli citizens while getting its kill lists from leaked WhatsApp data.

It’s all very well and good for the morally bankrupt and entirely complicit Western leaders to say it’s unacceptable and tragic, but it means absolutely nothing if they refuse to follow it up with some sort of meaningful action — something they have failed to do

The same global nuclear powers can scream and shout as much as they like about Israel’s right to self-defence, but what about the Palestinians right to self-defence? They’ve been suffering under a brutal occupation for nearly eighty years.

Britain, the United States, and its embarrassingly sycophantic allies continue to both-side a genocide as if it hasn’t been live-streamed around the world for all to see for themselves.

The elites think you are fucking stupid. They are relying on the same meticulous pro-Israel spoon-feeding that has served them so well for generations.

But I sincerely believe we are past that now. The Gaza genocide has opened the eyes of the world to the unbridled evil of Israel and all of those that continue to offer their backing — politically, financially and militarily — to the gravest of crimes committed against humanity in a vast majority of our lifetimes.

Israel and the West think we’re all stupid

Those poor, deluded people that thought Keir Starmer was going to stride on in and put an end to Britain’s complicity in genocide must be feeling ashamed of their very existence right now.

And what about these Trump-supporting ‘pro-Palestine influencers’ that deservedly earn a decent crust for the work they do in highlighting and exposing the atrocities being committed by Israel?

While they have been absolutely right to call out Joe Biden’s complicity, how do they plan to sell the ultra-Zionist Trump to their hoards of followers when the loathsome orange turd gives his genocide maniac friend, Bibi, the go ahead to wipe out the remaining third of Gaza and commit his very own Nagasaki for the 21st century?

As tens of thousands have perished in Gaza, Israel has stepped up its de facto capture of Palestinian land in the West Bank. Israeli authorities have approved strategic land seizures — almost 6,000 acres this year alone, marking the most significant territorial changes in the West Bank in decades.

Extremist settlers — essentially a violent, armed militia — are descending on Palestinian villages in the West Bank, wreaking havoc upon innocent Palestinians, under the protection of the Israeli state. The death and destruction isn’t exclusive to Gaza.

Netanyahu and his far-right allies in government have emboldened the extreme far-right settler movement. And while Netanyahu publicly condemns these settler attacks, the sheer extremism of the Zionist militia simply reflects the extremism of the Israeli government.

History will not treat us kindly

Whether the final death toll of the Gaza genocide is 50,000, 100,000 or even the staggering 186,000 that was predicted in the Lancet, earlier this year, historians will look back on these moments and ask why the West supported the genocidal, racist, apartheid endeavour that is Israel.

In a week where we have witnessed newborn twins brutally murdered in Gaza by an Israeli airstrike as a father registered their births, the unbearably painful sight of Palestinians having to use plastic bags to collect the body parts of their loved ones, murdered by Israel while sheltering in a school, and yet another Palestinian baby beheaded by an Israeli attack on innocent civilians, our calls to end the genocide of Gaza must grow louder and stronger than ever before.

Featured image via Rachael Swindon