Menticide As Gaza Atrocities Are Ignored

Jabalia concentration camp, October 21, 2024

Yesterday I had lunch with a friend who had just finished teaching writing to a class of elders.  A student asked how she was doing and my friend replied, I am distraught about Gaza. Student: Why? What's going on in Gaza? 

Today I encountered a new word, "menticide," defined as "a systematic and intentional undermining of a person's conscious mind; synonym: brainwashing."

Yesterday Gazan journalist Motasem Dalloul posted on Twitter:

A mother from #Jabalia says: “They took all the children from their mothers and put them inside what resembled a pit or a hole. The tank came to circle around them repeatedly until their bones cracked under the pressure of dust and sand, amidst the screams of children and the wailing of mothers. “After that, the soldiers came and started throwing the children towards the mothers, and whoever caught a child was ordered to carry him and move away quickly, with no guarantee that the child would be their own. “Many mothers carried children who were not their own, and were forced to leave with them, leaving their own children in the hands of other mothers. This marked the beginning of a new chapter of suffering, with mothers searching for their children in the arms of other women, trying to calm the children they held until they found their real mothers.“

I have no words adequate to describe how I felt when I learned what new horrors my tax dollars are funding in Gaza. 

Also yesterday, the sadists in charge of the Zionist entity Israel accused six of the few journalists still alive and able to report from Gaza as "terrorists." 

Here's Dalloul's post about that:

Day before yesterday, U.S. imperial media outlet CNN committed what turned out to be a blunder when they published a sympathetic piece on the late Eliran Mizrahi, an Israeli occupier who committed suicide after being deployed in Gaza. 

A blunder because here is what Guy Zaken, who drove a bulldozer with Mizrahi, had to say about his genocide-induced trauma:

Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”

“Everything squirts out,” he added.

Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.

“When you see a lot of meat outside, and blood… both ours and theirs (Hamas), then it really affects you when you eat,” he told CNN, referring to bodies as “meat.”

I think the phrase "had to" belongs in air quotes, don't you?

Nobody "has to" treat other human beings like this. 

Forced march of Palestinians being expelled from northern Gaza October 2024

Or this (trigger warning: video from September of an Israeli bulldozer running over a child).

Why don't Palestinians just give up and allow Israel to sell off Gaza's gas and oil rights and create settler colonies on top of the blood-stained rubble? An explanatory excerpt from the last will of Yayha Sinwar, who my friend's student has probably never heard of here in the menticide bubble of the U.S. 

"They fear your steadfastness more than they fear your weapons."

Show your steadfastness by standing with us at the General Dynamics bomb factory that makes these:

Take a stand in your community. That is, if menticide hasn't gotten to you yet.