Today, while the U.S. and Israel Commit Suicide, Legacy Media Sleeps

Using U.S.-supplied weapons, Israel has, in the last few days, …

* Killed 100 children per day in Gaza, with bombs, systematic point-blank murder, and denial of water, food, and medicine, according to the United Nations. 25-minute film: “Kids Under Fire.”

* Ambushed, tortured, and killed 15 Palestinian medics and civil defense workers and buried the evidence in a mass grave, including whole ambulances. Cellphone video of Israel’s attack was recorded by a paramedic who was inside the vehicle when it came under fire and was among the 15 aid workers killed. Israel has killed more than 409 medics have been killed over the course of the past 18 months.

* Shot a 14-year-old Palestinian-American boy in the West Bank, Omar Mohammad Rabea, in the stomach and refused to release him to paramedics, causing him to bleed to death. The West Bank is looking like the ruins of Gaza.

* Dropped a bomb on a tent housing journalists, causing several to be burned alive, including Hilmi al-Faqaawi and Ahmed Mansour. Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 2023 have killed at least 211 Palestinian media workers.

* Endangered the entire world with a revisitation of polio. In Gaza, 600,000 children are at risk of permanent paralysis because Israel is barring the entry of polio vaccines to Gaza as part of its broader overall blockade.

More than 38,000 Palestinian children have been orphaned by Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Meanwhile, on April 5th, NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed the author of a new novel, "These Days," set during the days and nights of the Belfast Blitz, when Germany bombed that Irish city during World War II. The discussants express sympathy and a kind of awe for the survivors of the bombing in 1941, what it must have been like, etc. They do not mention at all, in this interview, on this day, the present-day Israeli bombardment of Gaza–hospitals, universities, water systems, food convoys, ambulances, displaced-persons tent camps, and apartment buildings–strikes using U.S.-made bombs.

During the Holocaust, Germans went to their jobs and schools and music lessons, listen to radio shows, tended their flowers, oblivious to the trains entering the "factory" in Dachau. This is how it feels to be a citizen of a nation, the United States, as it commits genocide, comfortable and oblivious to its own actions.

A few brave leaders, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Congressperson Jamie Raskin, speak out against the madness, and vote against it.

One year ago, I had the honor of introducing Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah to an audience of 200. Dr. Abu-Sittah is Rector of Glasgow University and a surgeon and clinical lead for the Operational Trauma Initiative at the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for the Eastern Mediterranean. He warned that Israel’s genocide will be normalized. “It starts with the fact that it’s okay to kill 14,500 children in under six months, with the brilliant idea that actually starving a population is critical to winning the war,” he said. From there, “military academies will teach the destruction of health systems as an intrinsic component of the conduct of war. All of this means that what we’re watching in Gaza is how the wars are going to be conducted the rest of the 21st century.”

U.S.-Israel’s depravity is not new to human history. This is how empires fall: perpetual war, bankruptcy, moral depravity. The End-of-Times Christian Zionists who run the White House are members of a suicidal death cult. Racism. It’s a chemical weapon for the war that rages on inside our heads.

The Israeli Lobby, led by AIPAC, is the most powerful force in U.S. politics. The result? What Biden-Netanyahu did, and now Trump-Netanyahu are doing to Palestinians they are doing to all of us. Our universities; our hospitals; our health, safety, and emergency services; and our bio-defense research are all collapsing. These days, we are the Palestinians in Gaza.

Oh, sinner man, where you gonna run to? All on this day?

Steven Sellers Lapham is a 30-year resident of Montgomery County, Maryland