INTERNATIONAL (PEOPLES DISPATCH)

Maria Guardiola has put a lot of politicians, celebrities, journalists and others with a platform to shame

17 October 2023
Godfred Meba
56 Comments
        

Read Time: 2 minutes

Gaza: This statement by Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola’s daughter, Maria Guardiola has put a lot of politicians, celebrities, journalists and others with a platform to shame:

‘My God.

So is this really what we’re going to do now? Just sit back and watch a genocide happen on the telly? Then decades from now, when it’s in the history books, all look round at each other and ask, ‘how did that happen?’

For the first time, I truly understand how mass atrocities have been able to occur throughout history – again, and again, and again. We never learn.

What does the death count need to be before someone finally speaks against this madness and urges restraint, not more arms? 10,000? 100,000?

A million? More? When have enough Palestinians died?

I get that lots of us are scared to speak up. I get we’re afraid to say the “wrong thing. But I won’t sit by in silence and live with the fact that I never spoke up when an atrocity on this scale was committed because of fear. We can express our complete condemnation for what the Israeli govt are doing and also assert our unwavering belief in the equal value of Palestinian lives, without inciting hatred against Jewish communities – another persecuted people. Indeed, many Jewish and Israeli people, in the midst of their deep grief and knowing the pain of persecution too well, have had the bravery and strength to be the very first to do so.

This is quite simple. We are watching an occupied, oppressed people face annihilation by a nuclear state with the full backing of the western world. This is not – and has never been – an ‘equal fight’. Right now, it is a massacre on a scale I don’t think I’ve ever seen in my life.

6,000 bombs dropped in 6 days already. On a strip of land just 25 miles long and 7.5 miles wide at its widest point. Whole neighbourhoods flattened. Families wiped out. Hospitals collapsing under the weight of the casualties. On a population of 2 million – half of them children. 70% of them refugees. And now, the forced movement of 1 million people. A choice of forced migration or death is ethnic cleansing. The fact that it is impossible for that many to leave in that time means that this is now a genocide.

We have gone way, way beyond wishy washy ‘praying for peace’, ‘all life is precious’ IG statements, posted to show you’ve done your bit of performative activism. Show you mean it. If you have any kind of platform right now, please use it. Speak. Because it’s becoming glaringly obvious that the world is happy to walk into an unspeakable horror that we didn’t even bother to try to prevent.’

Palestine 🇵🇸

Credit: @Majstar7


        

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