First the good news: twenty-four hostages were released yesterday.  Among them was Doron Katz-Asher who was featured on my day 2 posting.  News reports say another fourteen will be released today.  Was I the only one who was surprised yesterday that twenty-four people had been released?  The news reports kept saying that thirteen were to be released.  So why the discrepancy in the numbers being reported?  We’ll come back to that.  But first….

I first need to critique CNN’s reporting on this.  After the release CNN kept making statements like “the hostages are moving to….”.  Excuse me?  No.  The former hostages were moving.  The freed hostages were moving.  From the moment the Red Cross convoy crossed into Egypt these twenty-four were free, they were no longer hostages.  And now for the real problem I have with the reporting from all media outlets and with the news releases from the Israeli government….

I am happy that twenty-four people are free and more are expected to follow today.  I am disgusted, frankly, with the news reporting and the actions of the Israeli government that I can only label as racist.  Eleven of those who were released are being completely ignored, they didn’t matter in the pre-release reporting and have not mattered at all since.  In every story they are a footnote, if even that.  Why?  Ten are from Thailand and one from The Philippines.   Why care about them?  They are likely migrant workers who were doing menial jobs.  CNN and the Israeli government reported the names and ages of every one of the thirteen.  They talked about the medical and psychological support that is being supplied.  CNN profiled all of the thirteen.  I heard their names, their ages, and backgrounds.  There were interviews with people who know them.  What did I hear about the other eleven?  They crossed into Egypt.  That’s it.  No names, no profiles, nothing.  No talk of support and help for them.  Not a damn thing.  It was clear they are throwaway people that don’t matter.  The eleven are not white.  It seems they are not Jewish.  And it’s clear they are not worth talking about.  And I’m unfortunately reminded that this is not uncommon.

If you ask most people in the United States, and probably also in Israel, how many people died in the Holocaust the likely answer is six million (and let’s be frank, too many in the U.S. either don’t know, haven’t heard of the Holocaust or will deny that it happened).  Yet this is wrong.  Six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.  Hitler’s killing machine took somewhere around twenty million lives.  Yet the narrative is rarely inclusive.  The killing didn’t start with people of Jewish descent.  First the Nazis killed others they deemed undesirable in their society: the mentally ill, the developmentally disabled, the mobility impaired.  The Nazis didn’t seek to just exterminate the Jews, their goal was to eliminate anyone and everyone that didn’t fit the Aryan ideal.  Their goal of extermination includes the Roma (what we used to call Gypsies).  Anyone who was gay/homosexual was murdered as were other non-white people.  The scale and impact to Jewish people outnumbered and outweighed any other group, but they weren’t the only ones targeted for destruction.  What did change, what was different with the Jewish people was the industrialization of murder, the creation of an assembly line of death and destruction of those killed.

Early in the Holocaust, when the mentally ill and developmentally disabled were targeted, methods like gassing with carbon monoxide were most commonly used, pretty much connect the exhaust from truck to a room and wait for the people to die.  The bodies were subsequently buried.  But this didn’t work for the mass scale of death that the Nazis planned.  Early in the attempt to eliminate anyone who was Jewish trenches were dug and people shot then buried (I included a picture of this in “Never Forget #3“).  The Nazis came to three conclusions: there wasn’t enough space to bury everyone, that burial also left too much evidence of the killing, and that the use of ammunition to kill would impact the war effort.  Hence, they created the killing machine, the mass production of death through gassing and cremation that we saw in places like Auschwitz.

So why recount this history?  To remind that the whole story needs to be told, that the lives and deaths of all those involved matter.  Prior to yesterday I didn’t know that people from Asia had been kidnapped.  Did you?  Why are their lives and stories being discounted, not being told?  I believe that every innocent life in this conflict matters, Asian, Palestinian, and Israeli (OK, maybe not so much the lives of those in Hamas, but they don’t qualify as “innocent”).  And yeah, I’m infuriated as much by the willingness of Hamas to allow Palestinian lives to be lost to aid their propaganda as I am by the loss of lives on October 7.

#resist #neverforget

Be the Pebble