Alex Kane’s and Chris Hedges’ Cautionary Perspectives on Gaza Can Be Understood More Universally — Both Are about the Global Trivialization of Evil for Profit

© 2014 Peter Free

 

14 August 2014

 

 

Citations

 

Alex Kane, How Israel's Assault on Gaza Is One Big Marketing Campaign for Its Weapons Manufacturers, AlterNet (11 August 2014)

 

Chris Hedges, What Israel Has Become: Dropping 1,000 LB Fragmentation Bombs on People Living in Concrete Hovels, AlterNet (12 August 2014)

 

Shuki Sadeh, For Israeli arms makers, Gaza war is a cash cow, Haaretz (11 August 2014)

 

 

Theme — when we look beneath camouflaging lies, the unethical twistedness of commonly accepted practices is clear

 

Alex Kane and Chris Hedges, both writing in AlterNet, addressed this subject in regard to Israel’s recent brutal handling of Gaza-based rocket attacks.

 

Kane makes a commonly overlooked economic observation about Israel’s use of military force.  And Hedges elevates Kane’s implied criticism to a religious one that most followers of the Abrahamic religions will (at least) understand.

 

I refer to both essays, not to dump on Israel, but to make the broader point about the global Military industrial Complex’s use of public fear to profit itself in ways that would shock morally clearly sighted people.

 

 

Marketing war’s weapons

 

Alex Kane wrote:

 

 

Israeli weapons companies are making a killing off the ongoing assault on Gaza, which has caused over 1,900 Palestinian casualties, most of them civilians.

 

As Israeli economist Shir Hever, who studies the Israeli arms industry, explained to the Real News Network on July 30, Israeli arms companies “have learned to work in symbiosis with the U.S. arms industry so that they develop their technologies together in order to provide components which are produced in Israel and work with U.S.-manufactured weapons.”

 

Hever also explained that “every two years or so, the Israeli military attacks Gaza, attacks the Gaza Strip, and causes a lot of destruction.

 

“But right after each one of those attacks, there is a trade show in which Israeli weapon companies show their wares, show their technologies, and boast that these are the very technologies that have been used just now against Palestinians in Gaza.”

 

One of those companies is Meprolight, which makes equipment for sniper rifles and for night-fighting.

 

“After every campaign of the kind that is now taking place in Gaza, we see an increase in the number of customers from abroad,” Meprolight chief Eli Gold told Haaretz.

 

“Of course, we [are] marketing abroad aggressively, but IDF operations definitely affect marketing activity.”

 

© 2014 Alex Kane, How Israel's Assault on Gaza Is One Big Marketing Campaign for Its Weapons Manufacturers, AlterNet (11 August 2014) (extracts)

 

 

Chris Hedges’ lead paragraph makes a religiously obvious point that most Zionists and American Christians conveniently overlook

 

He said:

 

 

God’s covenant in the Promised Land was not made with those who pilot F-16 fighter jets that drop 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs over the concrete hovels of Gaza.

 

It was not made with those operating Apache or Cobra attack helicopters that unleash lethal fire over crowded refugee camps.

 

It was not made with drone operators that clinically kill children ... outside mosques.

 

It was not made with occupiers that reduce an entire people to a starvation diet—indeed count the calories to keep them barely alive—or to those who use words like “mowing the lawn” to justify the indiscriminant slaughter of innocents.

 

God’s covenant in the Promised Land was not made with politicians—including every member of the U.S. Senate—that mouth words for peace and perpetuate war . . . .

 

God’s covenant in the Promised Land was not made, finally, with any race or religion.

 

God’s covenant—in the Bible and the Koran—was made with the righteous.

 

© 2014 Chris Hedges, What Israel Has Become: Dropping 1,000 LB Fragmentation Bombs on People Living in Concrete Hovels, AlterNet (12 August 2014) (extracts)

 

 

More universally

 

One can easily indict American militarism on the same grounds.  With Russia doing the same thing in Ukraine on a smaller scale.

 

Militarism is profitable.  It is sold under the guise that the (apparently cowardly) Homeland needs protection on this massively cruel scale.

 

 

The moral? — Follow the money

 

Money’s often unethically grubby flow speaks more truthfully than the doublespeak used to justify and cover its tracks.