Editor:
Thank you, North Coast Journal, reporter Kimberly Wear and managing editor Jennifer Fumiko Cahill for featuring local hero Wind Beaver who risked his life to personally bring humanitarian aid to the two million Palestinian civilians suffering nearly a century of occupation, oppression, apartheid and, now, two years of genocide and starvation (“What Else Can We Do?” Oct. 9).
For perspective, consider the 61 airmen who lost their lives delivering 1.5 million tons of humanitarian aid in just 11 months, saving two million cold, starving, homeless German civilians in the aftermath of WWII (*), despite many of these same German civilians voting for a government that murdered millions between 1940 and 1945.
Mr. Beaver’s actions follow in the footsteps of his predecessors whose moral lives of confrontation won women’s suffrage, the G.I. Bill, Social Security, Medicare, the minimum wage, safer food and workplaces, cleaner air and water, etcetera.
History repeatedly demonstrates the short mental leap between tolerance for state-sponsored atrocities abroad, inevitably turning inward, as we’re seeing today with unconstitutional military occupations of U.S. cities and the normalization of de facto concentration camps imprisoning residents abducted from city streets, homes, businesses and public parks, forced to prove their residency status only after being kidnapped by heavily armed, masked men in unmarked vehicles violating the 4th and 6th Amendments. Every mindful person should be concerned asking, “Who’s next?”
“The power to be mean with impunity provides a psychic income of no small value,” (Nat Hentoff).
With Palestinians barred from peace talks and their negotiators murdered by Israeli drones, ongoing worldwide protests, boycotts, divestments and sanctions against the Zionist government of Israel, (and their military suppliers), must continue or apartheid and murder will likely continue.
* “Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time”, page 904, by Georgetown University scholar Carroll Quigley.
George Clark, Eureka
This article appears in Protecting the Night.