LinkedIn is becoming like Facebook except I reserve non-business posts and comments for truly serious and literally existential issues like the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza. You can start with my comment followed by Johanna’s indignant response, and my response to her response. Crickets after the latter.

Like many, you’ll notice she trots out the old canard, self-defense, as a justification for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza and now Lebanon and Syria. How lame. It’s obvious she’s consumed enormous quantities of the blue and white Kool-Aid served up by Israel’s 24/7 propaganda machine.

Human rights, indeed. What about the Palestinians’ and others’ basic human rights? It’s also abundantly clear Johanna doesn’t have a clue how racist most Israelis are. But, hey, aside from that and the murder of tens of thousands of civilians with no end in sight, Israel “is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights.”

Mark Ashwill Managing Director & Co-Founder at Capstone Education

Israel and the US have a great deal in common. They’re both essentially settler colonial states that have inflicted untold suffering and misery on “undesirables” within and beyond their borders. It’s a given that the lives of their citizens are more valuable than those of “the other.” Take the US war in Vietnam, for example. 58,220 US Americans perished while 3.8 million Vietnamese were killed. Yet it’s always been about US(A). This Harold Pinter quote is relevant: “The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good.” One difference is people ARE documenting and talking about Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity. Another is that Israel doesn’t masquerade as a force for universal (or regional) good. Both will ensure that Israel, a terrorist state by any reasonable definition of the term, will also become a pariah state, an outcast in the global community. https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/04/30/a-letter-from-viet-nam-on-the-occasion-of-the-45th-anniversary-of-the-end-of-the-war/

Johanna Higgs, PhD Human rights Anthropologist and gender specialist

Mark Ashwill I think that this is a very unfair and very uniformed comment. Calling Israel a ‘terrorist’ state is beyond unreasonable. It is the only democratic country in the region that respects women’s and homosexual rights. It allows anyone to have citizenship, regardless of their ethnicity, UNLIKE their neighbors. They are continuously attacked and then blamed when they resound in defense. What is also continuously ignored is the widespread hate for Jewish people, and non Muslims in general, that runs rife in the region. It is ignored that this is the primary reason for the continued aggression and hostility towards Israel as is the fact that all of the other countries in the region run tyrannical regimes that don’t afford the rights to their citizens that Israel does.

Mark Ashwill Managing Director & Co-Founder at Capstone Education

Is the genocide occurring in Gaza “self-defense”? That’s the all-purpose argument whenever Israel kills innocents in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon. Do you have a selective interpretation of human rights? I think you need to take a close look at your moral compass. While you’re at it, look up the definition of “state terrorism.” Just to be clear, here’s who I stand with.

Peace, MAA