Be Wary of Nations

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 but sent her adjutant in a limousine. 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 killed in the West Bank. 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 the silence on the genocide in Gaza, she tried to tell me that her speech referring to ‘conflict in Gaza‘ was sufficient at such a time and on such an occasion. Her mention of Gaza coincided with her 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 United States. I could barely listen to the governor’s speech, read out by her adjutant, so steeped it was in reference to the high minded thinking of failed liberals like John F Kennedy and Joe Biden, war mongers and hypocrites both.

This is what United Nation President Antonio Guterres‘ representative in Australia had to say at the commemoration. Mention of South Africa but no mention of its case against Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Why can’t they break the silence eight months into the genocide in Gaza?

Is it because the United Nations created the problem in the first place in 1948?