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Dr. Joseph Dillard is a psychotherapist with over forty year's clinical experience treating individual, couple, and family issues. Dr. Dillard also has extensive experience with pain management and meditation training. The creator of Integral Deep Listening (IDL), Dr. Dillard is the author of over ten books on IDL, dreaming, nightmares, and meditation. He lives in Berlin, Germany. See: integraldeeplistening.com and his YouTube channel.

SEE MORE ESSAYS WRITTEN BY JOSEPH DILLARD

Realism Regarding Western Support of Genocide

Joseph Dillard

Were the American revolutionaries terrorists? From the perspective of King George and many in England, indeed they were. However, most people today, even in Great Britain, regard American revolutionaries like George Washington and his army, as “freedom fighters” who fought against an oppressive occupying power. How is that different from what Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran are doing in regard to Palestinians today? Are Palestinians not occupied and oppressed? Have they not been long denied basic human rights accorded to their oppressors?

Like the Nazi holocaust, the genocide of Palestinians is a deliberate, state-directed attempt to exterminate an entire ethnic group, in whole or in part, which complies with the internationally accepted definition of “genocide” promulgated by the United Nations. A common objection to this position is that these groups are appropriately labeled terrorists because they have attacked civilian populations. But the evidence of October 7th shows that targets of Hamas in Israel were soldiers, with the object of gaining hostages to trade for Palestinians in captivity in Israel. Other Gazans who followed them through the breaches in the perimeter wall were the major source of Palestinian crimes on civilians.[1] We also know that many, perhaps the majority, of the 1,222 Israeli casualties on October 7th were carried out by the Israeli military under the “Hannibal Doctrine,” which authorizes the killing of Israeli hostages as preferable to them being used to bargain for the release of Palestinian prisoners. According to Haaretz and Times of Israel, major Israeli newspapers, the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) ordered the employment of the Hannibal Doctrine on October 7th.[2] What proportion of participants in the “rave” just beyond Gaza in Israel were Israeli army reservists, not innocent civilians?

Like the American Revolution, October 7th and the following war of resistance has been waged primarily by militias and local armies - Hamas and Hezbollah - although state actors on both sides support the violence. In the Revolutionary War, France supported the revolutionaries, and today Yemen and Iran support Palestinian revolutionaries.

How does the number of deaths perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th compare with the number of deaths perpetrated by the West in recent wars of choice? The US and its allies killed over five hundred thousand children in its war on Iraq alone. That does not count the estimated number of women and children who were killed in Western wars of choice in Syria, Libya, and Lebanon. If Hamas is a terrorist organization due to its killing of civilians, how much more terroristic are the governments of the West? To argue that there is in some way an equivalence in the amount of terrorism on both sides and that therefore that justifies Western terrorism, is absurd. Such an equivalence clearly does not exist.[3] That some of the deaths of civilians in these Western wars of choice were caused by opponents is an argument that disregards the reality that these wars would have never happened and those civilians would not have been killed if the West had not chosen to invade and attack. If attacks on civilians defines terrorism, then the behavior of Israel, the U.S., NATO, and the EU more than fulfills that definition.

It is far past time to move beyond political correctness and fear of upsetting supporters of fascism, and thereby suffering condemnation, ostracism, censorship, or financial pain. These are bullying techniques commonly employed by fascists, among others, to smother dissent for ongoing criminality. For indeed, what else can you call those who actively support with money and arms the ongoing murder of women and children, with the intent of either driving out or exterminating entire populations? Isn't that what the Third Reich did? Do we not call people who do such things, in the defiance of fundamental international laws and the moral standards that separate humans from animals, “fascists?” Who, in our world today, are the terrorists and who are the freedom fighters? Like the Holocaust, what Israel and the West are conducting in Palestine is a systematic, industrial expulsion and extermination of an entire population. History will show that those who arm, fund, and conduct genocide are terrorists, just as history and international law regards The Third Reich. History will show that those who take up arms to resist genocide, apartheid, indiscriminate murder, and expulsion, are freedom fighters.

Today, in our world regarding Palestine, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran are the freedom fighters. Future history books will teach children the shameful and disgraceful reality that those of our time that most loudly pronounced their support of freedom, human rights, and morality, - Israel, the U.S., NATO, and the EU, - are in fact a gang of international terrorists. Our unwillingness to see that reality, much less to call it out and say, “I support Hamas,” is a reflection of the depth to which we have been brainwashed and intimidated into massive immoral groupthink.

When is it finally time to say, “Yes, my argument is inflammatory and will polarize and enrage some readers, but is fact-based and reflects fundamental principles of personal and collective morality that are foundational to what it means to not only be 'civilized,' but human?” How much nuance and “multi-perspectivalism” regarding the moral and legal ambiguity of the motives of Germans before and during WWII is realistic? How willing are you to rationalize and excuse genocide, particularly when it is happening every day before your very eyes? When do you allow yourself to say, “I would not allow and condemn the behaviors being inflicted on Palestinians if they were done to my family, and therefore, I condemn those behaviors being inflicted on Palestinians today.”

If you ever wonder what you would have done if you were a German during the 1930's and 1940's, look at what you are doing now.

NOTES

1. Asa Winstanley, "How Israel killed hundreds of its own people on 7 October", The Electronic Intifada, 7 October 2024.
2. Jean Shaoul, "Israel's use of Hannibal Directive led to many deaths on October 7, including Israeli civilians", World Socialist Website, 10 July 2024.
3. According to the Iraq Body Count project, between 180,000 and 210,000 civilians were killed during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq between 2003 and 2011, with women and children making up a significant proportion. The report estimated that children constituted about 12% of these civilian casualties. In the fight against ISIS, post 2011, between 2014 and 2017, intense urban warfare, airstrikes, and terrorist attacks led to high civilian casualties in Iraq. A UN report in 2017 stated that thousands of women and children were killed, particularly during the Battle of Mosul. These civilians in Iraq died as a direct result of an illegal Western-instigated war. U.S. Secretary of State Madelyn Albright, in an interview in 1996, notoriously stated that the deaths of some 500,000 Iraqi children as a result of the Western war on Iraq, was “worth it.” "Madeleine Albright Endorsed Killing Over 500,000 Children in Iraq", World Future Fund, no date.
   
   Regarding the Syrian Civil War, from 2011 to the present (2024), the United Nations and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights have estimated civilian deaths to be over 200,000, with a large portion of these victims being women and children UNICEF estimates that since 2011, over 25,000 children have been killed in the conflict. Women and children in Syria have faced high risks not only from bombings and ground conflict but also from starvation, lack of medical care, and targeted violence. Again, regardless of the number of civilians killed by ISIS and other adversaries, those deaths resulted from wars instigated by the West on countries that were no threats to those Western nations.
   
   In the Libyan Civil War, from 2011 to the present, estimates by organizations like Human Rights Watch suggest that thousands of civilians, including women and children, were killed in the 2011 uprising and subsequent conflicts, particularly during airstrikes and artillery attacks on urban areas.
   
   In the Lebanon war of 2006, between Hezbollah and Israel, the Lebanese government estimated over 1,100 Lebanese deaths, primarily civilians, with women and children accounting for a significant portion. UNICEF reported that around 30% of those killed were children.