Genocide Day

Senator John Cornyn Houston Office Protest (a weekly event), 3 July 2024.

Here in the US, Columbus Day is gradually giving way to Indigenous People’s Day. Columbus and other European explorers helped launch genocides among indigenous peoples they encountered in the New World.

Today — literally this day, 14 October 2024 — Americans are still helping Israel perpetrate genocide among indigenous people of modern Palestine … using your tax dollars and mine. An abomination. Israel could not maintain this monstrous evil without ongoing US military aid. Israeli leaders openly admit it. US bombs are shredding women and children almost daily.

Israeli snipers target young children with shots to their head and chest. They target clearly marked aid workers. They assassinate journalists wearing vests emblazoned with “PRESS”. US bombs have shattered nearly all of Gaza’s schools, hospitals, universities and other infrastructure. As the International Court of Justice has found, this is genocide.

More than 500 years ago, Columbus raped and slaughtered his way through the Caribbean, wreaking a path of destruction and cruelty that most Americans still celebrate — not surprising, given our own blood-soaked history with Native Americans and large-scale land theft.

With malice aforethought, corrupt US politicians and corporate media purposely conflate the beautiful, ancient religion and culture of Judaism with Zionism, a political movement organized a mere century and a half ago.[1] In the 1940s, Zionists metastasized into US-supported terror gangs. They systematically murdered and dispossessed indigenous Arab families living on the land in Palestine, the start of what Palestinians call the Catastrophe (Nakba). Those terrorists soon morphed into the Israeli military, again with massive US funding.

Senator John Cornyn Houston Office Protest, 8 Oct 2024, marking the 400th consecutive week of this event.[2]

From Columbus to the Catastrophe, it’s all genocide, murder, land theft. It’s still going on.

Columbus Day would be a great time to call a halt. Start by not being complicit: contact your lawmakers this and every day to demand a permanent Palestine ceasefire and Israel arms embargo. Thank you.

1. https://www.facebook.com/ira.dember/posts/pfbid067QBzQuw8TVntxMWDG4Ae9oGqvD4CE7EpRERwZJnPr78MT8RzAPBTCeCKXjQ8AuGl
2. At left, Alex McDonald, author of “How I Learned to Speak Israel — An American’s Guide to a Foreign Policy Language.” A Quaker, Alex is policy director for the Texas Coalition for Human Rights and helps develop educational materials on the Middle East.