Gaza Genocide Protests: A Preview of What’s to Come
As oil dwindles, violence and repression will increase
Fossil fuels created everything we see, touch, wear and eat. Fossil fuels bring food to our tables, power our water treatment plants, and provide lights and heat to our homes. Fossil fuels have built civilization as we know it. An unsustainable and unequal one, beginning to crumble.
Big Oil knew, decades ago, global warming was coming. This three-part series from Frontline explains it in detail. They employed their own scientists to confirm their suspicion, then spent decades lying. You don’t have to worry about the devil when the devils walk among us.
Fossil fuels power our commutes to jobs that no longer support us, let alone provide security. The turbocharged neoliberal form of capitalism originating in Chicago School Economics was first violently perpetrated in South America. I wrote about that in The Economy We Need to Save Ourselves. It cost tens of thousands of lives and destroyed hundreds of thousand of others. It snuck into South Africa when Apartheid fell, and arrived in the US when smiling B movie actor Ronald Reagan began breaking unions and funneling wealth to the top with trickle down “Reaganomics.” Antitrust laws have been undermined, and mega corporations have risen, creating a billionaire class which is wildly, disproportionately responsible for destroying the planet. It has been found a billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person, not just from their profligate lifestyles, but their investments as well. The inflation we suffer today is purely from corporate profiteering and an obscene military budget, now $825 billion. This is how the Fed and the system works. Inflation and injustice in the world is from wealth hoarding, monopoly control and investing in bombs, not people.
Overconsumption, which is the inevitable result of any kind of capitalism and should not be confused with freedom and democracy. In fact, it’s democracy’s greatest enemy, having created in essence a modern feudal system. Over extracting the Earth will collapse all wealth because wealth is built on exploiting rather than managing her with care. However, we of modest means will collapse first. Those who have luxury bunkers last.
Young people are risking expulsion from their schools and their future security, since they don’t see a future of security. They identify with the plight of the Palestinian people.
Genocide in Gaza is fueled by gas and oil deposits
We are leveling forests, bleaching coral reefs, and dropping bombs from the sky on Gaza that blow little children to bits to maintain this system. Why? Because there is gas and oil in the Mediterranean Sea west of Gaza, and we want it. Chevron is there. According to the industry, the Levantine Basin holds approximately 1.7 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 122 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas. Woo-hoo. Party.
This explains the barbaric assault on the tiny, open air concentration camp, its back against the sea called the Gaza Strip. The deplorable attack by Hamas on October 7 created flimsy cover for Netanpsycho yahoo to justify the slaughter and starving of women and children, and the murder of journalists and aid workers trying to bring truth and save lives. Over 34,000 are dead, and as of April 30, 13,000 children have died, 19,000 have been orphaned, and ten a day lose limbs.
Our kids are our conscience
Young people today grow up with little or no hope. They are depressed and rightfully angered by a planet scale ecological collapse growing worse by the day, and the reality of being forced to participate in a system creating that collapse. Additionally, getting a college degree in the US has become a questionable exercise. In many countries, a college education is provided for free, in wise recognition that boosts society as a whole. Here, it’s a massive debt that may take decades to pay off. Meanwhile, our young people have witnessed massive financial fraud. The banks destroyed the economy in the recession of 2007-2009 and were bailed out at taxpayer expense. Only one Wall Street executive went to jail.
They’ve witnessed the Iraq War, in reality a Geneva Conventions defying invasion, with non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as cover. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died in the process, directly or indirectly. Extraordinary rendition was invented (state-sponsored kidnapping) to grab supposed enemy combatants, throw them in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons without specific charges or legal representation, and torture them at will. More recently, they’ve watched our enviable system allow a dolt and con man named Trump rise to the presidency, and now Biden sending hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons to Israel via his discretion, to enable this blatant mass slaughter.
This is not the America I was taught to believe in, but it’s the one I have experienced. These protests remind me of those of the Vietnam War. History has shown which side held the higher ground as our government lied and protests escalated to violence. The police were used necessarily, but also inflamed the situation. Bottom line, when it comes to the police, they uphold the rule of law, even if the rule of law isn’t the same as justice.
These protests are being undermined by three elements, vandals and miscreants taking advantage, those who refuse to recognize protesting genocide is not antisemitic, and a radical element using inflammatory language such as the word intifada, which could certainly be evidence of an antisemitic element in the ranks. This is profoundly disappointing, but prejudice is a predictable constant in human behavior. Unfortunately, use of the word intifada assists Netanyahu in branding these demonstrations as antisemitic, and apparently much of the Israeli population feels this way, too. However, the radical Zionists waging this atrocity are guilty of ugly language, as well. At the start of this tragedy on October 9 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated:
“We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly... there will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed.”
Jews are protesting Palestinian genocide as well
Just as in our illegal war against Iraq, Jews have come out to proclaim Not in Our Name against the genocide being carried out in Gaza. They have gathered and protested across the nation in NYC, Washington D.C., Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Oregon. They’re part of the protests on college campuses, at considerable risk, exposed to an angry antisemitic element. They’ve been arrested by the hundreds, standing up for the Palestinians. Moral ethics exceed the definition of specific religious affiliation.
Over 2000 protestors have been arrested on campuses since April 17. It’s likely many face expulsion for their courage to take a moral stand. Our colleges and universities should be places where it’s safe and encouraged to exercise free speech. To defeat bad ideas, it’s essential to have them out in the open. However, like every institution in America, power and money compromise our higher education system. Every college president has a board to answer to, and those boards are composed of people who hold great wealth. A prime example is Betsy DeVos of the Amway family fortune, later to be the Education Secretary under Trump, no friend of public education, promoter of a far-right Christian agenda, and the wealthiest of his cabinet members.
Students are calling on universities to disclose and divest their investments in companies and organizations linked to Israel and its war on Gaza.
Their demands include:
Ending business with military weapons manufacturers that supply arms to Israel.
Stopping acceptance of research money from Israel for projects that aid its military efforts.
Ending relationships with money managers who profit from Israeli companies or contractors.
Being transparent about what money is received from Israel and what it’s used for.
These demands cut to the core of the system, money and where it’s invested. Even the most mundane index funds include Big Oil and the military industrial complex. That’s why mainstream coverage of these protests is weak at best, and so many arrests questionable. Young people are risking expulsion from their schools and their future security, since they don’t see a future with security. They rightly identify with the plight of the Palestinian people.
Violence against our own is well established.
We put down labor movements with police enforced brutality.
We secretly infected black Tuskegee airmen with syphilis.
We allowed women to succumb to gruesome cancer deaths, painting aircraft dials with radium laced paint.
We put at least 125,284 Japanese people in concentration camps.
We created a dossier on Martin Luther King.
I could go on and on. Power is the end of a gun, a barrel of oil or cubic foot of liquid natural gas. As fossil fuel dwindles and climate change effects worsen, violence and repression will increase. Freedom is an illusion. Probe in the wrong places, and we find that out. These campus protests are an illustration of that fact. We must support our young people. Pull your money out of a fossil fuel supporting bank today. Get out of investments that include military industrial stalwarts like General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. These are good places to start. Money is the only language greed understands.
Powerful, Geoffrey. Your voice stands apart.
Geoff: Thank you. I always learn from your articles. I remember your Dad telling me about Betsy DeVos, when she served on the BOD of Kendall College of Art and Design, when he worked as President. Probably not an easy member to deal with!