{"id":284545,"date":"2025-01-13T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-01-13T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=284545"},"modified":"2025-01-10T07:26:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-10T07:26:50","slug":"a-worlds-soul-in-tatters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/a-worlds-soul-in-tatters\/","title":{"rendered":"A World\u2019s Soul in Tatters"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>8 Jan 2025 <\/em>– \u201cI left you for God, Daddy.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let those words resonate across the planet. The speaker is Yahya Al-Batran, a Palestinian man \u2013 a dad \u2013 imagining the words his newborn son would have said. The boy, Jumaa, froze to death in the family\u2019s tent. The infant had a twin brother who was also lying still in their bed one morning recently. The parents rushed the boys to a functioning hospital, where Jumaa\u2019s brother, at the time NBC\u2019s story<\/a> came out last week, was still fighting for his life.<\/p>\n

Jumaa was one of half a dozen Palestinian babies (so far) who have frozen to death in their family\u2019s tents since the onset of winter \u2013 just one more fragment of hell the Palestinians are enduring as Israel\u2019s US-complicit genocide continues . . . one death at a time.<\/p>\n

Every week, every day, I have less of a sense of how to write about this or, indeed, how to think about it as I absorb the news of the day. Yes, there are wars and hellish suffering across the whole planet \u2013 there always have been \u2013 but in this current moment I feel less able to shrug and move on with my own life. I feel connected to it: a participant, you might say, simply as a citizen of the genocide\u2019s largest enabler, as strike after strike after strike kills more Palestinians.<\/p>\n

As Abby Zimet<\/a> writes: \u201cAmerica\u2019s newest $8 billion contribution to an increasingly normalized genocide and its bloody, barbarous, macabre delusions will ensure more of the same. As Gazans plead for mercy and reason from an uncaring world, they in truth know and say they have \u2018nothing but God.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

An increasingly normalized genocide . . .<\/p>\n

I think that\u2019s what\u2019s shredding my soul about this: the lack of any sort of mainstream awareness beyond the need for endless militarism \u2013 beyond the world\u2019s brutally divided nature. Us vs. them is apparently the limit of our understanding, with no awareness of the effect that ongoing war against \u201cthem,\u201d and the ensuing planetary dividedness, is having on our shared human home, not to mention our future.<\/p>\n

A recent New York Times<\/a> mini-analysis of America\u2019s current mass murder situation \u2013 particularly the horrific motor-vehicle murders in New Orleans on New Years Day \u2013 definitely seemed, as I read it, like the normalization of genocide, in its implication that only our enemies are bad. Watch out, the story warned us: Terrorism is back!<\/p>\n

\u201cThe killing of 14 people on New Year\u2019s Day in New Orleans was the latest sign of a resurgence in radical Islamist terrorism,\u201d the Times story informs us. \u201cSome of the attacks \u2014 like the one last week \u2014 seem to have been merely inspired by ISIS, the network of groups that are offshoots of Al Qaeda. In other cases, ISIS groups played an active role in the planning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The alleged killer, who drove his rented truck into a crowd of people in the French Quarter, had an ISIS flag in the truck. The Times then proceeds to catalog sixteen instances of violence over the last five years, in countries all over the world, that were either \u201cinspired by\u201d or directly plotted and carried out by ISIS.<\/p>\n

And who the hell is ISIS, anyway? The story notes that the organization came into being during the US war in Iraq, but fails to mention . . . uh, the half a million or so Iraqis who died as a result of our bloody invasion. All that matters, apparently, is the emergence of the terrorist organization, not the US shock-and-awe bombings and brutal dismantling of Iraq\u2019s national infrastructure. You know, the terrorists just popped up and started doing bad things. If this isn\u2019t the normalization of genocide, it\u2019s something worse: the utter denial of genocide.<\/p>\n

A few paragraphs later, the Times story moves to Afghanistan, noting that President Biden\u2019s withdrawal from the country in 2021 \u201creduced the pressure on an ISIS chapter there known as ISIS-K, and it has since expanded beyond Afghanistan. ISIS-K was behind the Iran bombing, the Moscow concert attack and the Taylor Swift plot.\u201d<\/p>\n

So, shame on Genocide Joe! His pullout allowed ISIS to expand. For some reason the story fails to note that, prior to its withdrawal, that US military presence in Afghanistan resulted in over 175,000 Afghani deaths.<\/p>\n

As Brown University\u2019s Costs of War<\/a> project notes: \u201cIn Afghanistan, even after the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2021, people continue to die due to the war-induced breakdown of the economy, public health, security, and infrastructure. The majority of the population faces impoverishment and food insecurity. The CIA armed Afghan militia groups to fight Islamist militants and these militias are responsible for serious human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings of civilians. Unexploded ordnance from this war and landmines from previous wars continue to kill, injure, and maim civilians. Fields, roads, and school buildings are contaminated by ordnance, which often harms children as they go about chores like gathering wood.\u201d<\/p>\n

Attention, New York Times: Terrorism doesn\u2019t exist all by itself. While actions thought to be terrorist in nature can indeed be horrific, they cannot begin to compare to the horrors that result from heavily armed state terrorism \u2013 in particular, the terrorism committed by the \u201cgood states,\u201d i.e., the United States and its allies. We live in a disconnected planet at war with itself \u2013 and in possession of the means to kill itself.<\/p>\n

A year ago, on, good God, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Columbine shootings, I wrote<\/a>: \u201cWhat is power? Is it simply and sheerly us vs. them, good vs. evil? Every war on Planet Earth is sold with this advertising slogan. Perhaps this is why I find myself thinking about the Columbine shootings \u2014 and all the mass shootings since then. Define an enemy, then kill it. This is what we learn in history class \u2014 but would-be mass shooters, caged in their own isolation, cross a line. They take this lesson personally.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of which is to say that war begets violence of all sorts and at every level of devastation. \u201cI left you for God, Daddy.\u201d Perhaps these will be our last words as we exit the planet we have chosen to destroy.<\/p>\n

______________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Robert C. Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His book, <\/em>Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is still available. Contact him at <\/em>koehlercw@gmail.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 commonwonders.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8 Jan 2025 – \u201cI left you for God, Daddy.\u201d Let those words resonate across the planet. The boy, Jumaa, froze to death in the family\u2019s tent in Gaza. An increasingly normalized genocide . . .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":122360,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[554,1854,87,865,88,651,70,965],"class_list":["post-284545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tms-peace-journalism","tag-children","tag-crimes-against-humanity","tag-gaza","tag-genocide","tag-israel","tag-justice","tag-usa","tag-war-crimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284546,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284545\/revisions\/284546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122360"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}