Palestinian Confederates
April 10, 2024
As a student of American history I can’t help but notice the striking similarity between what is going on today in Gaza and what went on some 160 years ago in the U.S. In 1861 Abraham Lincoln thanked his naval commander, Gustavus Fox, for helping him dupe the South Carolina Confederates into firing on Fort Sumter by placing warships in Charleston Harbor. No one was harmed let alone killed by the bombing of the fort, but Lincoln used it as an excuse to send an initial 75,000-man army to invade eleven Southern states and wage total war on the civilian population for four years.
Today we are supposed to believe that Israel’s vaunted Mossad, assisted by the CIA and the massive American “intelligence community,” the Pentagon, and the entire might of the U.S. military-industrial complex, was totally surprised by Palestinians on motor bikes and on foot who easily and conveniently broke through the “impregnable” barriers into Israel. According to news reports, it was as easy as with the January 6, 2021 protesters who, after being invited in by the police, entered the U.S. Capitol
building. The motor bike riding Palestinians did some barbaric and reprehensible things, randomly shooting and killing hundreds of innocent Israeli citizens (although there is now evidence that many of the Israeli victims were victims of “friendly fire” by their own military). As the entire world now knows, the government of Israel, like Lincoln, used this event as a reason to wage total war on all Palestinians in Gaza, women and children included.
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By the mid nineteenth century international law had evolved to the point where everyone understood that intentionally targeting civilians was a war crime that deserved the severest of punishments, and such punishments did occur. Lincoln single handedly turned all of that on its head by waging total war on the civilian population of the South from the very beginning of his war. Indeed, his initial war plan was called “the Anaconda plan” because it sought to surround and blockade the entire South and literally starve out its population by depriving it of food, medicine, and much else. American court historians such as James McPherson and Stephen Oates have used words like “brilliant” and “an act of genius” to describe the waging of war on Southern civilians by the U.S. Army (with the help of thousands of new immigrants from Europe).
McPherson has written that some 50,000 Southern civilians, women and children included, were killed by Lincoln’s armies. Coming from James McPherson that is probably a gross underestimate. Today’s population is more than ten times what it was in the 1860s, so that would be the equivalent of the U.S. government today murdering more than 500,000 American citizens. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in his book, The Legacy of the Civil War, all of this mass killing and the destruction of entire cities was said to have created a “treasury of virtue” within the U.S. government, so much so that whatever the government did in the future would be, by definition, virtuous because it was the U.S. government that was doing it. And if that doesn’t work, there’s always the quip by General Sherman that “war is hell.” That is meant to tell the public to just shut up about all the war crimes that Sherman committed. To the extent that the public does shut up, it makes it more likely that such crimes will be repeated over and over, as they have been.
Keep in mind that in his first inaugural address Lincoln pledged his support for the Corwin Amendment to the Constitution that would have prohibited the government from ever interfering with slavery. Indeed, Lincoln was the real author of the amendment which he instructed William Seward to get through the senate, and he did. It had passed the Republican-controlled House and Senate before inauguration day when Lincoln lied about it saying that he had heard of it but hadn’t seen it, but nevertheless supported it. Fat chance that trial lawyer Abe was unaware of the text of a constitutional amendment to enshrine slavery in the Constitution that had been passed in the House and Senate by his party. Then there’s the 1861 War Aims Resolution of the U.S. Congress (the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution) that declared to the world that the invasion of the Southern states had nothing whatsoever to do with slavery. As Lincoln said in his first inaugural address, it was his duty “to collect the duties and imposts” (protectionist tariffs, which had been more than doubled two days earlier), but beyond that “there will be no invasion of any state.” The war, Lincoln announced to the world in March of 1861, was about forcing the Southern states back into paying federal taxes to the government in Washington.
Lincoln’s repudiation of international law’s prohibitions on intentionally waging war on civilians opened the door to all of the worst horrors of the twentieth century and its World Wars. It evolved into the spectacle of Americans celebrating such things as the firebombing of civilian-occupied Dresden and the dropping of atomic bombs on Japanese civilians during World War II. These atrocities and war crimes were justified by that “treasury of virtue,” which was morphed into “American exceptionalism.” Dropping nuclear bombs on civilians was indeed exceptional since no one else has done it before or since.
What is going on today in Gaza is just the latest episode in a state’s bloodthirsty mass killing of civilians by the thousands under the guise of “national defense.” Chris Hedges of The Real News Network compiled myriad news reports from reporters on the ground in Gaza, and other sources, and described the effects of the Lincoln way of war being waged there by William Tecumseh Netanyahu. Only Netanyahu is doing it with modern military technology, much of which is supplied by American defense contractors.
Hedges reports that 77 percent of all healthcare facilities in Gaza
have been destroyed along with 68 percent of telecommunications
infrastructure, half of all roads, 60 percent of all homes, and 68
percent of all residential buildings. All the universities and other
educational facilities were bombed and shutdown. More than 200 heritage
sites and 208 mosques and churches have been destroyed. The Israelis
have so far dropped 25,000 tons of explosives on this 25-mile by 5-mile
piece of land, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs. They dropped
2000-pound bombs on refugee camps. That’s one way to get rid of
“refugee problems.”
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There are 1.7 million homeless people now in Gaza according to Hedges, and 32,705 Palestinians had been killed at the time of his report with another 75,000 crippled for life from bullets and bombs. Hundreds of doctors and nurses were killed in all the bombings, and starving people are eating grass and animal food. Disease is rampant.
This is all apparently a part of Israel’s own “Anaconda Plan.” Hedges quotes Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant declaring that his goal is that there is to be “No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” in Gaza. There is even talk in Israel of dropping nuclear bombs to finish the job.
According to Lincoln’s wife, his law partner William Herndon, and his personal body guard, he was an atheist. He nevertheless was fond of quoting Scipture to make the Boobus Americanae of his day think that what he was doing – waging a war that may have killed as many as 850,000 Americans — the equivalent of almost 9 million today — was the will of God.
Netanyahu has also recently invoked Biblical language to “justify” his mass killing of Palestinians. In a public oration he quoted Samuel 15:3 saying, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.” And, quoting “Our Holy Bible”: “Now go and attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” That is the Israeli war plan according to their commander in chief.
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