Thank you to Ten Bears for the link. At the time I write this the number of Palestinian deaths is over 2,300 which is more than double the number of Israeli deaths caused by the Hamas raids. Plus the number of Palestinian injured is more than 4 times the number of Israeli’s injured during the Hamas attacks. Israel has gotten their pound of flesh. Hugs
There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.
Friends,
Today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken stood next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a military base in Tel Aviv and said, “Too often in the past, leaders have equivocated in the face of terrorist attacks against Israel and its people. This is — this must be — a moment for moral clarity.”
Blinken is correct. Moral clarity requires that the world condemn the atrocities committed by Hamas militants as unmitigated evil.
But this does not render morally justifiable retaliatory airstrikes on Gaza that have so far killed 1,417 Palestinians, including 447 children, and wounded 6,368, according to Gaza’s health ministry. Or the siege of a city of 2.1 million people who have gone days without electricity, water, or food.
The wounded in Gaza needing intensive care now have no beds that can hold them, and the number of injured exceeds the hospitals’ capacities. The International Committee of the Red Cross warns that “without electricity, hospitals risk turning into morgues.”
More than 300,000 people in Gaza are now homeless. More than 338,000 have left their homes in search of safety, but border crossings into Israel and Egypt are blocked.
Israeli troops are now moving toward the border with Gaza in preparation for a possible ground invasion. I fear what is to come.
It could prove to be very bad for Israel, as well as for those trapped in Gaza. As Thomas L. Friedman writes,
What Israel’s worst enemies — Hamas and Iran — want is for Israel to invade Gaza and get enmeshed in a strategic overreach there that would make America’s entanglement in Falluja look like a children’s birthday party. We are talking house-to-house fighting that would undermine whatever sympathy Israel has garnered on the world stage, deflect world attention from the murderous regime in Tehran and force Israel to stretch its forces to permanently occupy Gaza and the West Bank.
In his private meetings with Israeli authorities, I hope Antony Blinken is calling for restraint.
Justifiable moral revulsion must never be confused with retribution. There is no moral clarity in wreaking vengeance on innocent people.
I want to thank PERSONNELENTE for the link. Most things I am hearing about the Hamas attack on Israel is all the horrible things that Hamas committed. And I 100% agree that what they did is horrible. But that doesn’t give the Israeli government and Israeli military the right to also commit horrible tragedies to the civilian Palestinian population. If it is wrong for Israeli children to be harmed, it is also just as wrong for Palestinian children to be harmed. Period full stop. Palestinian civilians and children have as much worth as Israeli civilians and children! Israel is using US supplied planes and missiles to level entire city blocks in Gaza while the people are still in them. Israeli military is bombing UN schools and hospitals. All things the US / world said was a war crime when Russia was doing them.
Please watch the very short subtitled clip of a Palestinian child showing the rubble that was her home, and saying how scared she is. Sad tearful hugs.
I wanted to post an update of something I got wrong. The tatted up guy at the end of the video had a VERY different story than the one that was told to me.
Turns out he was not only at the show, he was a fan AND the guy that first got the attention of the police. He was so heated because he is part of the LGBTQ community and had been assaulted previously – so when he saw it potentially happening to a few trans women, he grabbed a cop who was stopped at a light, ran back to the theatre, and got in between the transphobe and the women. He wasn’t trying to escalate as much as he was trying to be the one to take the seemingly inevitable punch. And he left when the cops got there because he was the one who called them over in the first place.
I was told he was a bystander who just hopped in the fray, and I understand why the folks who didn’t know him thought that. In their eyes, he showed up out of nowhere and ran in – but really he was running back to protect folks from sharing the same fate he’d already experienced.
Anyway, my apologies go out to him. And know that if I ever get something wrong in a video, I am happy to correct it.
Enlarge/ Students from Launch Charter School gather for a rally for National Gun Violence Awareness Day at Restoration Plaza on June 2, 2023, in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn borough in New York City.
As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in 2020, so did another grim reality: For the first time, guns became the leading cause of death for American children and teenagers, surpassing car accidents, the long-standing leader.
In 2021, youth firearm death rates did not fall to pre-pandemic levels as hoped, but instead continued a sharp rise to hit a new record high. That’s according to a recent study led by researchers in New York and published in the journal Pediatrics. The study was based on national mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Nationwide, there were 4,752 firearm deaths of American children and teens (ages 0 to 19) in 2021, translating to a rate of 5.8 gun deaths per 100,000 people. The deaths represent a nearly 9 percent increase from 2020 (4,368 or 5.4 deaths per 100,000).
The study looked for disparities and trends in the data. As before, firearm deaths were largely in older teens, with 83 percent of deaths in teens ages 15 to 19. Most were among males, who accounted for 85 percent of the deaths. Black children remained disproportionately affected, with the gap widening—50 percent of the deaths were among Black children. The death rate among Black children and teens increased from 16.6 per 100,000 in 2020 to 18.9 per 100,000, the largest increase among the racial categories.
As for intent, 64 percent of the 2021 firearm deaths were from homicides and 30 percent were from suicides, with the remainder from unintentional shootings. Homicide rates increased across all age groups, which was part of a multi-year trend. Between 2018 and 2021, homicides increased 66 percent in the 0–4 and 5–9 age groups. For kids ages 10–14, homicides increased 100 percent and 62 percent in teens 15–19.
The racial disparity in homicides was stark, with the rate of deaths among Black children being 11 times higher than that of white children. For suicides, white children accounted for 78 percent of the deaths.
Regarding where children and teens had the highest rates of firearm deaths, the study found that places where baseline death rates were already high got worse—namely in the South.
Enlarge/ Pediatric firearm mortality rate by state and year from 2018 to 2021. States with absolute mortalities <20 are grayed out because of unreliable crude death rates (these include Arkansas, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, Wyoming, and District of Columbia).
“In 2021, firearm mortalities were largely concentrated in Southern states,” the authors wrote. “Louisiana had the highest death rate per 100,000 persons (17.0), followed by Mississippi (14.8), Alabama (11.4), Montana (11.1), and South Carolina (10.2).”
The authors speculated that this could be due to “variability in social determinants of health, inequity, firearm access, legislation, and access to preventative strategies (violence intervention, suicide prevention, firearm safety).” State poverty levels were also tightly linked with pediatric firearm death rates, the study found.
In all, the authors called for more data to understand the deadly trend and develop prevention strategies.
“These findings highlight the necessity and urgency of real-time epidemiologic surveillance of this epidemic and implementation of evidence-informed strategies to prevent pediatric firearm fatalities among children and adolescents at highest risk,” the authors wrote.
Again Ten Bears has found a great video to watch. This one is shorter than the last and details quickly a bunch of the malfeasance trump committed. Hugs. Scottie
