No Health Reform for Gaza;
But Death Panels they Have
While Americans are debating their own health system, they are unindicted co-conspirators in an effort to degrade the health, mental and physical, and to half-starve the people of Gaza. The callousness, ruthlessness and selfishness of this policy, in which all Americans are implicated, is breathtaking. In Gaza, there really were death panels deciding who lived and died last winter, and they wore Israeli uniforms.
More on the wretched public health situation in Gaza, which is a direct result of Israel's siege of the little place and its brutal war on it last winter, which is contributing to the political radicalization of the population:
Palestinians are among the most secular people in the Middle East over all, and the vast majority was uninterested in radical Islam until very recently. It is being put in what is essentially a prison camp by the Israelis that is driving some Gazans to extreme ideas and measures.
Two-thirds of Gaza's 1.5 million people are estimated to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Wayne Anderson writes:
' The most common traumatic events reported by the sample indicated 96 percent experienced shelling and bombardment of their area, 95 percent had watched mutilated bodies on television, 93 percent had seen the effects of bombardment on the ground, 72 percent said they had at times lacked water, food and electricity during the conflict, and 72 percent said they had moved to a safe place during the war. Scoring from the DSM-IV, the standard psychiatric manual, indicated 67 percent of the sample rated as having PTSD.'
The Israeli blockade is also limiting Gazans' access to proper medical supplies, according to the World Health Organization.
It is to the point where ten percent of children in Gaza are stunted, and stunting is increasing.
These almost apocalyptic public health problems, the direct result of a long-term and systematic siege operated by Israel with US and Egyptian complicity, are certain to create dire problems for all concerned. That Americans are doing this to a people and just not talking about it makes you worried that they aren't very sincere in their professed interest in reform in Iran or other issues. This one, we fund through Congress.
End/ (Not Continued)
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/16/2009 12:23:00 PM
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7 Comments:
THANK YOU SO MUCH for this outstanding posting on the crimes committed in Gaza.
I am sending this to many people, asking them to forward it, because such a succinct and factual account is essential for Americans to start understanding what the rest of the world already knows.
www.philipweiss.org is the other essential site I've shared with all my friends.
You are a brave man, I can only hope the rest of us will think and write and take action as we did to end Apartheid South Africa.
-Another American for the equality of all people regardless of race or religion
Thank you for presenting an obvious truth so compellingly. It weighs down my heart to think that it is so unlikely that the American people or our Congress will ever recognize or respond to this truth. I do not have any wildly anti-Semitic conspiracy theory to explain this sad belief. I think it is the product of a certain intellectual inertia and failure to evaluate fixed beliefs in the face of new information. It is something all Americans must own and change and not the responsibility of persons of any particular faith, ethnicity, or nationality.
From Orwell's celebrated novel 1984:
"... the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government...
It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word 'crimethink'."
In precisely the same way, "the confiscation of people's land, the theft of their water, the demolition of their homes, the destruction of their crops, the denial of employment, education and health care, the machine-gunning of their children" is tidily summed up in the single word "anti-Semitism".
"Palestinians are among the most secular people in the Middle East over all..."
How do you measure this exactly?
Thanks for emphasizing this.
I just saw a presentation a couple nights ago by a group of women who visited Gaza with Code Pink. I am still reeling from what we saw and heard. This authored by the people who suffered the Holocaust? Gaza is the moral failure of our age.
After hearing the Israeli Ambassador to the UN tell us that the people in Gaza have just not made any effort to educate themselves, get jobs, build industry, etc. He lamented that they should be like the Germans after WWII and "get with the program" (my words, not his). I wrote him and suggested that the Germans were lucky and able because of the Marshall Plan. In addition, I suggested that Israel should institute a Marshall Plan for their occupied territories just as the US did for Germany and Japan. I also noted that even with the Marshall Plan it took around 10 years to get both countries moving again.
Keep up the good work, Dr. Cole.
Elizabeth Bishop-Martin, Athens, Ga.
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