“In the end, we will not remember the words of our enemies, but we will remember the silence of our friends” – Mazin Qumsiyeh.
This year, I attended the United Nations Peacekeepers annual commemoration in Anzac Square. The Governor didn’t come, as she usually does, but sent her adjutant in a limousine instead.
Both the Governor and Australian Peacekeepers and Peacemakers Veterans Association are still cowering under a U.S. mandate that Israel must be supported, as the U.S. congress is in the process of inviting war criminal Netanyahu to address it.
There was no mention of the genocide in Gaza currently under way, the devastation, and murders in the West Bank that have increased in the past 18 months.
But then ‘peace’ is a colonised word, meaning that the United States is a ‘peaceful’ country. That Australia is a peaceful country. Even though they both participate in US-led wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine.
All nations are complicit in the genocide, either by admission or omission of their leaders.
When I asked a Professor of Law at Griffith University, Susan Harris Rimmer, why she was silent on the genocide in Gaza, the learned professor told me that her speech referring to ‘conflict in Gaza’ was sufficient at such a time and on such an occasion.
The academic mention of Gaza coincided with acknowledgment of conflicts in Vietnam, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq but not the genocides in East Timor or West Papua, both aided and abetted by Australian governments, as is the genocide in Gaza.
Most of these ‘conflicts’ are fueled by both Israel and the United States. I could barely listen to the governor’s speech, read out by her adjutant, so steeped it was in references to the high minded thinking of failed liberals like John F Kennedy and genocide Joe Biden, war mongers and hypocrites both.
The United Nation President Antonio Guterres’ representative in Australia had nothing to say about the genocide at the commemoration. Mention of South Africa, but no mention of its ICJ case against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Why can’t they break the silence eight months into the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza?
Is it because the United Nations created the problem in the first place in 1948?
Ian Curr
30 May 2024