Netanyahu's destruction of Gaza recalls Kissinger's carpet bombing of Vietnam and Cambodia.
There was a bit of a 60’s flashback for me yesterday what with Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s speech to an empty Senate chamber denouncing Students for a Democratic Society (26 minutes in) and then the news of the death Henry Kissinger.
SDS dissolved over 50 years ago.
Way to be timely, Chuck.
But maybe he has a point, if an unintended one.
SDS in the 60s was the largest student anti-war and social justice organization in our country’s history.
Full disclosure: I was a member and president of the Los Angeles City College chapter of SDS in 1967.
Schumer’s speech, which attempted to equate criticism of the current war on Gaza by Israel with antisemitism, made reference to a protest at Harvard back in the day by SDS of an appearance by Israel’s UN Ambassador at the time, Abba Eban.
Schumer was a student at Harvard at the time.
To be clear, Schumer is wrong now and he was wrong then when he equates criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
It is true that many of us in SDS, including many of us who were Jews, were supporters of justice for Palestinians and supporters of a free Palestine.
It was for many of these same reasons that we opposed the war in Vietnam, took part in Freedom Summer and organized the Free Speech Movement on campuses.
What Schumer was doing about these issues at the time as a Harvard student is unknown to me.
Henry Kissinger’s passing was long in coming. He was 100 when he died yesterday.
Among the many crimes Kissinger and Nixon were involved in was the American carpet bombing of both Vietnam and Cambodia.
Writes The Washington Post:
Journalist Seymour M. Hersh, in “The Price of Power,” said Dr. Kissinger and Nixon were basically two of a kind: They “remained blind to the human costs of their actions. The dead and maimed in Vietnam and Cambodia — as in Chile, Bangladesh, Biafra and the Middle East — seemed not to count as the President and his national security adviser battled the Soviet Union, their misconceptions, their political enemies, and each other.”
Kissinger and Nixon justified the bombing, the deaths of thousands of non-combatants, as the collateral damage necessary to defeat the National Liberation Front of Vietnam.
Their plans ultimately failed, as we know.
They claimed the Vietnamese were using civilians as shields, which is the very argument that Israel’s leaders are using to justify the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of thousands of Palestinian children.