Tag: norman Finkelstein

The Advance of Maleficence

~ The Koboi Project

The Massacre of the Innocents (detail) is one of a 36 paintings on 4 panels, the majority of which are by Fra Angelico, in the Museo di San Marco, Florence. This extensive series includes another painting addressing the Lex Amoris doctrine of Saint Thomas Aquinas, which arguably sets the theme for the series as a whole. This doctrine is articulated in the inscription on this painting, “Christ did not come to me to destroy the old laws of the patriarchs, but to renew and complete them with a new Law of Love.” Perhaps, the Massacre of the Innocents, underscores by antithesis, the essential New Testament principle of love.

In this primordial image of slaughter, a group of soldiers is represented impassively working its way across the scene, effortlessly slitting the throats of babes in the arms of their desperate mothers who, despite their bodily resistance, are soon to be completely overwhelmed. Viewed abstractly, a solid mass of darkness advances from left to right with strong momentum and at a steady pace, portending the imminent extinguishment of all light and color in the image. In the latest reprise of this archetypal act of inhumanity, 8,663 Gazan children have been slaughtered (UpdatedDecember 19) in an equally malefic military movement, a movement that Norman Finkelstein might describe, after Israeli sources, as ‘mowing the lawn.‘

See also:

Grace in the Face of Suffering

Netanyahu channels King Herod!

Le Massacre des Innocents

Witness to Slaughter

Image: https://scottdodge.blogspot.com/2010/12/feast-of-holy-innocents-martyrs.html

http://www.travelingintuscany.com/art/fraangelico/armadiodegliargenti.htm

https://fraangelicoinstitute.com/2018/05/27/fra-angelico-and-the-armadio-degli-argenti-part-3-of-the-heaven-on-earth-exhibition/

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

https://www.normanfinkelstein.com/norman-finkelstein-israel-mowing-the-lawn-in-gaza/

The Morality of the Concentration Camp

~ The Koboi Project

In a moving and stunningly clarifying interview with Chris Hedges, Middle East scholar, Norman Finkelstein gives a historical and personal lesson about the morality of oppression. He locates the meaning of terrorism and the targeting of civilians within the context of genocide and ethnic cleansing, he refers to the Slave Revolts of Nat Turner and John Brown, as well as his own parent’s experiences of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and of Nazi concentration camps.

He contextualizes the acts of terror committed against civilians by HAMAS in terms of the traumatic spiritual and psychological conditions, the despondency and rage, of living in occupied Gaza. He cites Fredric Douglas and W. E, B. Du Bois (on John Brown’s killing of civilians) and, particularly, William Lloyd Garrison (on the killing of innocents in the Nat Turner Rebellion), all three of whom refused to condemn the brutal rebellions against the humiliations, degradations, and physical assaults of slavery. He also quotes his mother, whom he holds to be a deeply moral person, about her thoughts about the millions of German civilians who died in the Allied terror bombings of World War II. She said, “Our feeling was if we’re going to die, we’re going to take some of them with us.”

Describing Gaza as a “Concentration Camp” Finkelstein declares, “You want me to apply moral categories, condemn? … I’ll describe my reaction. I will acknowledge by a dictionary definition that it constituted a very large atrocity. That’s a dictionary definition, and it’s accurate. However, when you want me to apply a moral category to what happened, you lose me … I won’t do it!”

26. 10 2003 update: 7,028 people killed by air strikes in the Gaza Strip.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-death-toll-names-killed-released-biden-questions