Will It Take 10,000 More To Be Killed?
By John J. Duncan Jr.
“I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” – General Dwight Eisenhower in a speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa, Canada on January 10, 1946.
A little over one year later on June 3, 1947, Eisenhower gave the graduation speech at the United States Military Academy at West Point, his Alma Mater. In that speech, he said, “War is mankind’s most tragic and stupid folly… For Americans, only threat to our way of life justifies resort to conflict.”
Many people remember his farewell speech warning against giving too much power to the military-industrial complex. But Eisenhower gave probably the most anti-war speech ever given by an American President on April 18, 1953, just three months after taking office.
Speaking to a convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, he said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms… it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
This was a man who spent most of his career in the military, yet he had the courage in 1956 to refuse Israel’s demand that the U.S. join it in its war against Egypt over control of the Suez Canal.
We have not had a president since then (several of whom I supported) who has had the guts to stand up against the extremely powerful Israel Lobby.
Every year since 1896, one U.S. Senator, alternating between the parties, reads George Washington’s farewell address on February 22. In his farewell address, Washington warned against “overgrown military establishments” and “accumulation of debt.” He also cautioned against “entangling alliances” with other nations.
His words from 1796 could be applied to our relationship with Israel today: “So likewise a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest… and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification.”
The late Charley Reese was chosen as the most popular columnist by many thousands in a poll conducted several years ago by C-SPAN. He was a staunch conservative, and he wrote in a very plain, down-to-earth way.
I agree with the words he wrote in 2004: “I harbor no ill feelings toward Israel. In many ways it is an admirable country, but it is a foreign country, and the United States should treat Israel the same as it treats every other foreign nation. We should make it clear, for example, that Israel’s enemies are not our enemies. If the Israelis and the Syrians don’t get along, that’s their business. Our relations with Syria should be based strictly on how Syria treats Americans and America’s interests.”
Reese added: “We should not be involved in the Middle East at all except as purchasers of oil, but we will go on spending treasure and blood in that area until the American people elect some politicians brave enough to face down the Israeli Lobby.”
In his book, “Coming To Palestine,” Sheldon Richman, a Jew, wrote that the “sheer cruelty…of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and… justice, social cooperation, free exchange and peace.”
In that book, Allan Brownfeld of the American Council for Judaism wrote that “the early Zionists not only turned away from the Jewish religious tradition but, in their disregard for the indigenous population of Palestine, Jewish moral and ethical values as well.”
He quoted a Jewish historian, Maxime Rodinson, who wrote: “Wanting to create a purely Jewish or predominantly Jewish state in Arab Palestine in the 20th century could not help but lead to a colonial-type situation and the development of a racist state of mind and in the final analysis to a military confrontation.”
The Palestinians have been horribly mistreated for 75 years, and this has caused much hatred and hostility to build up. But nothing could justify some of the cruelty by Hamas on Oct. 7. They deserve the worst imaginable torture.
But as I write this, some 10,000 Palestinians, including over 4,000 children, have been killed. One major refugee camp was hit with six 2,000-pound bombs, killing several hundred civilians to get one Hamas member.
Chris Hedges, who covered the Middle East for both the Dallas Morning News and the New York Times, said 48% of Gaza housing has been destroyed. He said what is going on now is ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Will it take 10,000 more – or 20,000 – before Netanyahu will be satisfied? All this killing could create even more Hamas members. This madness needs to stop.
