Trump's assertion that Gaza can become the “Middle East Riviera” by forcibly displacing 2 million Palestinians smacks of the kind of colonialism that left the Middle East fractured and violent in the first place. Oh, and it's also incredibly fucking cruel.
I didn’t think any of Trump’s asinine antics could shock me anymore.
Well, color me corrected and utterly gobsmacked.
In a White House announcement made in the company of Israel’s war-mongering Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump said he wanted the United States to take over Gaza – displacing millions of Palestinians along the way – and turn the coastal enclave into the “Middle East Riviera.”
First off: besides being morally reprehensible, Trump’s neocolonial fantasy is super-fucking illegal, it’d be a direct violation of the Geneva Convention, which explicitly states you cannot forcibly displace an entire people.
And if that illegality doesn’t irk you, I’ll remind you of America’s most recent failure in the Middle East, costing us thousands of American lives, about a million locals, and more than a trillion dollars…
Iraq
Am I somehow the only American who remembers what a god-awful shitshow the Iraq War was?
This egomaniacal monster we call a president is taking America right back to the poisonous position of Arab-world occupation that President George W. Bush thrust us into 22 years ago with his heinous invasion of Iraq on unfounded (i.e., completely bullshit) assertions that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was allied with Osama bin Laden.
Thousands of Americans died, and many returned home physically and emotionally wounded – for no reason! – leaving behind a nation and people that were cruelly and needlessly mutilated.
And now, Trump, who promised NOT to get America embroiled in overseas wars, wants to do it again so he can build more shitty casinos emblazoned with his name.
Didn’t he crow about not getting the United States embroiled in any foreign wars during his first term?
The sons and daughters of Postindustrial America will pay for Trump’s ignorance and hubris with their lives, just as they did in Iraq.
Their families will carry the woeful, lifelong burden of losing loved ones due to Trump’s psychotic obsession with real estate deals and wealth, as if all the money in the world would ever fill the cold, empty void where a heart should be.
Meanwhile, the Palestinians will be rounded up once again and relocated, which would result in the kind of resistance that’ll make al Qaida and the Islamic State’s fight against American forces look like child’s play in comparison.
Were Trump to order a full-scale invasion of Gaza, Sunnis and Shiites would lay down their centuries-old feud and band together to inflict maximum casualties on American servicemembers and turn the United States into an international pariah.
