Commentary

No excuses

August 7, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

The photographs from Gaza filling our newsfeeds of people and their children dying right before our eyes by the direct order of a madman, determined to match the evil that was committed during WWII with his own version, his own genocide. In WWII, the wholesale and intentional deaths of millions of people were denied – more or less – hidden from worldwide witness.

This present time, these months, the wholesale and intentional killing by starvation is worldwide public knowledge, indeed has been flaunted as though justified amid lies and excuses.

During those unbelievable wartime months and years of murder by gas chambers, the rest of the world’s nations did nothing. How much they actually knew and denied such things could ever be; whether some truly did not know, for sure some did, and they did nothing. Only by capturing the perpetrators and bringing the war to an end did the absolute proof shown over and over come to light, and retribution to the survivors and their descendants for generations begin.

At this moment, the strength and justice of that retribution cannot be measured in this column. The memories the elderly survivors hold likely still haunt their sleep. Especially that they were not rescued over all the time they suffered by cowardly and/or indifferent world leaders might have planted resentment in their hearts that is passed on through the generations now and perhaps forever.

Yet here is another madman, who is one of them, in his national identity at least, one who may use those memories of those other deaths as reason enough for his own reign of death by starvation now.

We are all very well informed this time about the proofs of this genocide. 

Speaking of haunting, the terrors cast upon so many millions of victims, seem to still shake the resolve for action among today’s world leaders as they watch the same news as we do and tremble to imagine what actions they can truly take in view of the tender hands that have tried to manage resolutions with the madman in recent times. 

When a thunderous push back to demanding restraint and compassion for the starving men, women and children, when every attempt to bring relief of food and other necessities from outside Gaza meets armed denial, meets being shot, all by order of the madman’s own government.

Can you picture a soldier being told to deny access, to actually shoot people coming for the relief and rescue of food and medicine, to actually shoot to death the volunteers bringing the goods? How must that soldier feel, no matter his “education.” The sight of a purposely starved child must surely broach any conceding mindset.

Yet, there appears to be no international united and firm stance against this brutality. Once again, the world leaders stand, wringing their hands, making threatening gestures of recognizing Palestine as a country with insipid and unworkable conditions.

There are weak demands with no teeth to insist on relief, only the indefinite plan of incarceration for an entire nation of people, in a city jail of millions, reminiscent of WWII, where there were hideous concentration camps, mere holding cages to the trains of final death. 

In other news floats another idea about a Middle East Riviera hosting the rich and handsome with their yachts docking once Gaza is cleaned up…

All our lives, we are fed the stories of human brutality, and somehow it amazes me that we only seem to update our basic failing of offering harm over the common-sense approach of caring. Yet, every invention of strength to heal, aid, and benefit is quickly perverted to a tool of control and – without hesitation – as weapons.

In this extremely critical time to reduce to nearly nothing the use of fossil fuel, BP has discovered the largest source of oil and gas in the last 25 years in the oceans off Brazil’s east coast. Naturally, they immediately plan to “shift away from renewables” and are actively looking to “maximizing shareholder value moving forward.” (BBC)

Apparently, “BP’s attempt to transform itself into a ‘net zero’ energy producer has faced major hurdles since it put the plan into action five years ago.”

But they are going to be okay now.

Here we are with so much to do to stop the harm, our feet on the ground, our signs held high. The weight and corruption of harm stands against us as it has all through our history, but we have knocked it down many times. It bounces back, and eventually so do we.

Now, more than ever, the health of the very planet on which we live is in dire straits and threatened every day by our digging and blasting, our passion for poisons in our fertilizers, addictive food additives, unreasonable and devastating development and highways. We have to face and defeat so much, and we can because we must.

There must be an international stance against the ruin in Gaza, a force so serious that the madman is reduced in power to nothing and the people in his own country protesting the starvation and insanity in Gaza can bring sanity and safety back.

All this can be negotiated without a single shot being fired. 

It can. It must, and citizens around the world and here in Dufferin – we must urge our own politicians to show leadership.

Canada has always been a peacemaker.

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