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WAR WITH IRAN: Why Israel's ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is leading the United States to war with Iran, and perhaps World War III against the Muslim world

by Michael R. Burch, an editor and publisher of Holocaust and Nakba poetry

Should the United States fund and support another nation's wildly unjust acts of racism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and genocide? While it seems obvious that the answer should be a resounding "No!," when the nation in question is Israel, compassion, justice and logic fly out the window. Unconscionably, the government of the United States continues to provide billions of dollars in financial aid and advanced weapons to the government of Israel, which uses that largesse to continue demolishing the homes of Palestinians so that Israeli robber barons can steal the underlying land. If anyone resists this racist onslaught, Israel's government and military break their teeth, while the U.S. government ignores the altogether obvious horror while preaching sermons about "equal rights" and "democracy" to a disbelieving, disgusted world.

How can any thinking person believe in American "exceptionalism," when American hypocrisy has led to three Holocausts: the first of Native Americans who walked the Trail of Tears; the second of African Americans who endured slavery followed by a hundred years of Jim Crow laws, kangaroo courts and public lynchings; and the third of millions of Palestinians who have suffered terribly under the thumb of Jews and Christians for more than half a century? I subscribe to the old saw, "The proof is in the pudding." While Americans love to praise God, church and country, a simple examination of the facts indicates that we still have a long way to go, if we want to live up to our stated ideals of equality and justice for everyone.

While Jews and Christians use the Bible to justify this new Holocaust, which has left millions of completely innocent Palestinian women and children homeless and destitute since the Nakba ("Catastrophe") began in 1948, the Muslim world watches in horror, understanding the terrible facts on the ground. Those facts are amply demonstrated by the maps below, which explain why Americans now face war with Iran and perhaps the larger Muslim world:

Map 1 of 1946 Palestine shows more than 90% of the land belonging to Palestinians; at this point Jewish settlers had paid for most of the land they occupied
Map 2 of 1947 U.N. partition plan of Israel and Palestine; the land in the white areas was not "given" to Israel; Israeli Jews stole the additional land
Map 3 of 1967 borders of Israel and Palestine; these are the "1967 lines" aka as the "1949 armistice lines"; once again Israeli Jews stole the additional land
Map 4 of 2000 borders shows how Israel keeps stealing land outside its legal borders, creating discontiguous Palestinian bantustans



Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.—John F. Kennedy

It's not hard to understand why 9-11 happened, and the resulting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Just imagine your loved ones being swept from their native land like insects unworthy of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and how you would feel observing their degradation. As a Native American proverb suggests, we shouldn't judge other people until we've walked a mile in their moccasins. How would we feel, if our loved ones were Palestinians, and the governments of Israel and the United States chose to crush them like insects, demonizing them and blaming them for their own demise at every turn?

The American public has been inundated with propaganda claiming that 9-11 was an act of spite against an angelic United States that stands for equality and justice for all human beings, by an "axis of evil" that opposes American "values." This claim as as ludicrous as the claim that Sitting Bull was a "terrorist" because he revolted against a white supremacist American government. According to the American Declaration of Independence, when human beings are denied equality, justice and representative government, they have the right and duty to resist their oppressors, using force as necessary, just as the American founding fathers forcefully resisted the injustices of the British monarchy.

How could the British Monarchy have avoided war with freedom-loving American colonists? By granting them equality, justice and representative government. How could the governments of the United States and Israel avoid war with Iran and the Muslim world today? By granting Palestinians equality, justice and representative government. This would mean one of the following:

• Israel making Palestinians full citizens of Israel, with exactly the same rights as Jews
• Israel allowing the creation of a fully independent, autonomous Palestinian state
• A EEU-style arrangement, in which all Jews are citizens of Israel and all Palestinians are citizens of Palestine, but everyone can travel freely without visas or customs

Or any other arrangement in which everyone is protected by fair, nonracist laws and courts. But as of today, Israel is like the Confederacy, Nazi Germany, and apartheidist South Africa: it has Jim Crow laws, kangaroo courts and public lynchings. Such grotesque injustices make peace impossible, and when the U.S. government funds and supports such injustices, it invites the forceful rebellion, just as the British monarchy once invited the Revolutionary War.

The majority of the American public continues either to be deceived, or to only pay lip service to the American ideals of equality and justice for all human beings. The majority of Jews continue to either live in denial of this new Holocaust, or to only pay lip service to equality and justice. But the Muslim world is not deceived by the wild hypocrisies of the governments of Israel and the United States.

Thus, Americans face war against Iran and perhaps the larger Muslim world, because large-scale injustices always lead to violence and war, as the victims of oppression forcefully resist their oppressors. The great hypocrisy of the United States is that the American founding fathers were justified when they said, "Give us liberty or give us death," but that Muslims are the "axis of evil" when they say the same thing. The great hypocrisy of Israel is that "the only democracy in the Middle East" can establish the rule of the minority (Jews) over the majority (Palestinians) by ethnically cleansing the majority.

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