Recent disclosures of the Israeli practice of sonic bombing of the 1.3 million fenced in and captive people in the Gaza Strip may take the award for the meanest trick yet.
Israel’s pilots fly made in the USA F-16 Fighters low and fast, deliberately breaking the sound barrier over sleeping people. The shock waves can and do blow out the windows and break the eardrums. Anyone who ever heard a sonic boom, even from six miles overhead, can imagine the terror that children feel when the sonic boom is created right over their homes. Gaza is an island of children, four or five per family. Why terror? Because most people in Gaza have seen or felt death by explosive bombing.
America’s churches could end sonic bombing and other deliberate practices of starving and torturing the Palestinians overnight. To do so religious leaders need only to cancel their tourist junkets to Israel, and tell the world they are doing so.
Religious junkets to Israel are probably Israel’s biggest and most profitable tourist industry. Gifts of foreign aid from our government to theirs pay for the F-16s and Apache helicopters. While it is unlikely to end foreign aid quickly, it is possible to end tourist aid in a moment. Ending religious tourism in Israel is logical. God would seem to forbid supporting those who torture children, some of whom are Christians. Evangelicals should stop talking about their obligations to Israel long enough to listen to Jesus.
What would Jesus say about terrorizing the little children? He left not a word behind that would allow his professed followers to kill children or to terrify them, or to support anyone who does. Yet evangelical leaders openly support Israel with pricey religious junkets.
The diabolical meanness of the bully-boy, sonic bombers defies comprehension. The children of Gaza are used to being bombed with real bombs that blow off limbs and crush families under the debris. Most children in Gaza know shooting and bombing victims, so the sonic bombings play on the fear that is already present. We refer you to an outstanding detailed story in the Arab press Aljazeera with interviews that clearly show that sonic bombing is an ongoing plan, not an accident. It is a mass tactic little different than those used in Guantanamo, but in Gaza it is practiced in masse on half a million or more children!
In my brief and never to be forgotten few days in Gaza city, I saw and heard the sounds of real nighttime assassinations, the bombing launched from right overhead, from USA gifts of Apache helicopters. This 3 AM raid was enough to frighten me, even though I could rationalize that I was not at risk. I was under the rocket launchers, while others, a mile away, were on the receiving end of the missiles.
The sound of death came back to me at the speed of sound, dull thuds with faint flashes that lit a bit of sky where the Hellfire missiles exploded. The terror is felt by those who are on the receiving end, who don’t even know where the attackers have parked their helicopters. No Philistine child can ever be sure he is not a target when he hears the sounds of war.
A Gaza father (he is a Baptist) showed me the irreparable school where his sons had attended classes side by side with many Muslim boys only the week before, now destroyed by an F-16 with two 500 pound guided bombs. He told me his children were then without a school and did not want to go back to school for fear of the Israelis. That is Terrorism! Another Gazan showed me the City Prison, also destroyed by American planes, flown by Israeli pilots.
This writer is often accused of being partial to the Palestinians. I am without apology because they are the underdog and no one should apologize for standing up for the little guy. I will not apologize for favoring them any more than I would feel guilty for favoring a frail little kid in a fight against a school bully twice his age and size who first steals his sandwich and then taunts the victim into a can’t-win fight.
This does not mean I hate Israelis, it just so happens they are citizens of the top dog which is mauling its frail and virtually unarmed opponent. They have state-of-the-war arts F-16s; and the Gazans have a few handguns and home made rockets that rarely hit anything, and oh yes, home-made hand carried bombs.
It is a universal practice of the bully to accuse the little kid of just what the bully is guilty of. So it is with the Israelis and the Philistines. We have come to call the Palestinians, “Philistines,
