It was a spontaneous moment of honesty and clarity.
Rep. Angie Nixon, a Democrat, spoke before the Florida Legislature earlier this month in support of a resolution she sponsored calling for “de-escalation” and a ceasefire to end end the wanton killings of Palestinians in Gaza and beyond.
His voice rising with a mixture of sorrow and exasperation, Nixon asked his House colleagues this question: “We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will they be enough?
Republican Rep. Michelle Salzman responded – instantly.
“All of them,” she said.
Astonished, Nixon paused in her prepared remarks to acknowledge what other members of the legislature also heard: Salzman’s blatant invitation to genocide.
“One of my colleagues just said: ‘All of them.’ Wow.”
Wow, indeed.
The muted reaction to Salzman’s burst of genocidal honesty and clarity is an instructive example of the ingrained, marquee-sized hypocrisy that defines the way most Western politicians, journalists and society list of frothy “pressure groups” call any criticism of Israel “blood libel” or “anti-Semitic,” but say nothing and do nothing when one of their own encourages mass murder.
Despite Salzman’s predictable and hackneyed assertion that the brief emotion caused by his sinister remark was “fake” news, Nixon, rightly, was having none of it.
“I was clear about what I was talking about, which was the lives of innocent Palestinians. Period,” Nixon told a local TV station in Florida. “She said this when I asked how many Palestinian lives were to end. She was clear. She said, ‘All of them.’
Nixon and the Florida chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations insisted that Salzman be at least censured, if not resigned.
“Salzman’s words are incredibly dangerous and dehumanizing to Palestinians here at home and under Israeli occupation,” said executive director Imam Abdullah Jaber. “She faces party censure and public disavowal from all Florida lawmakers. »
Of course, unlike US-Palestinian Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib and the many writers, artists and citizens who have been pilloried, censored, fired or otherwise “written off” for taking a humane stance towards the Palestinians, Salzman has avoided the same direct: a life-changing destiny.
Salzman was not censured nor did she resign.
Nixon’s resolution on the ceasefire and “de-escalation” was rejected by 104 votes to 2. And, during the “debate” on its failure, it was Nixon who was attacked by the Republicans and a certain many of his Democratic colleagues prostrated with the usual tone. palette of distortions and lies.
Although he publicly condemned Hamas “terrorist attacks”, Nixon was actually labeled a “terrorist” sympathizer for supporting an “immediate cease-fire.” She was also accused of inflating the number of Palestinians killed and reprimanded for referring to “occupied Palestine.”
Meanwhile, Salzman escaped largely unscathed and, having quickly put an end to this fleeting turmoil, he may even have emerged emboldened.
On cue, Salzman delivered the canard to
Of course, that’s not the case.
Salzman’s injunction to genocide was not “inflammatory” rhetoric. Rather, it was a detestable decree: watching comfortably from sunny Florida as, week after week, Palestinians, including infants and children, huddled in the darkness of the ruins of occupied Gaza and the West Bank, are traumatized, mutilated. , and killed en masse with blind efficiency by Israel.
Salzman’s unhealthy suggestion did not deserve, to my knowledge, much attention from the major American media seized by the “Israel-Gaza conflict.”
Nor did it earn the immediate rebuke from cliché-addicted President Joe Biden or his trigger-happy surrogates inside and outside the White House, who are quick to denounce anyone , from whatever side, that challenges the stubborn, state-sanctioned narrative that Israel is always the saint and never the sinner.
Not a word.
Evangelical “pressure groups” that have pushed for the banishment of writers, politicians, artists and many others from public life for demonstrating or expressing solidarity with convicted Palestinians have remained silent in the face of Salzman’s call for genocide.
Once again, not a word of condemnation or reproach. Only a complicit silence.
Yet any attempt to dismiss Salzman’s crude response as an aberration would be a mistake.
As the relentless, murderous horror endured by Palestinians continues unchecked, my fear is that too many of Israel’s allies will join Salzman in responding to Rep. Nixon’s urgent question with: “All.”
Among them is Dr. Darren Klugman, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland.
In a series of chilling social media posts, Klugman, like Salzman, made clear his desire not only for the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their ancestral home, but also for their general erasure.
Klugman described Palestinians as “barbaric,” “savage” and “bloodthirsty, morally depraved” animals who want nothing less than every inch of Israel and all dead Jews.
Klugman wrote that it was “time to reconquer Gaza” since there is “plenty of sand for the Palestinians in the Sinai that Israel gave to Egypt.”
Finally, in response to an article by Palestinian writer Mariam Barghouti denouncing the fact that “Israeli policymakers are literally calling for a large-scale massacre” of Palestinians, Klugman wrote: “G-d wants it.”
It is, I suppose, too simple to claim that if a Palestinian doctor working in the United States used social media to announce such obscenities against Israelis, denunciations and sanctions would be swift and widespread.
Johns Hopkins Hospital has placed Klugman “on leave” while it investigates his “deeply disturbing social media posts.”
While a handful of US national media outlets covered this appalling story, Biden and company did not volunteer, nor were they asked to comment on or condemn Klugman’s hateful speech. The usually talkative “pressure groups” have adopted a “see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil” attitude.
Editors working at “elite” US media outlets have confirmed their establishment credentials by focusing their editorial and resources on the White House and Congress-endorsed “March for Israel”, which appears to have attracted fewer more people than the inauguration of Donald Trump.
Their effusive media coverage missed the rhetorical “doublespeak” at the heart of an event that applauded and defended the surrealist notion that war is peace.
When Van Jones, the self-proclaimed “man of peace” and ubiquitous CNN celebrity, proposed that the massive bombing of Palestinian civilians stop, the crowd of about 300,000 people jeered and broke into a chant of “not ceasefire.”
It should now be obvious that “no ceasefire” has become a polite euphemism for continuing to kill Palestinian children, continuing to kill their mothers and babas, continuing to bomb homes, schools, mosques, continuing attacking and desecrating hospitals, continuing to force thousands of elderly and infirm Palestinians to walk miles to find “safe haven” where none exists, preventing food, water and fuel of human beings desperate to stay alive in the ever-present prospect of death. Continue to commit genocide.
Michelle Salzman and Darren Klugman would no doubt also be shouting “no ceasefire.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
