US ambassador's remarks on Gaza boycotts an insult to intelligence, BDS slapsback in letter

We refer to Malaysiakini articles published on Aug 29 and 30, which featured an interview with United States ambassador to Malaysia Edgard D Kagan who questioned the 'practical impact' of boycott movements, including those by Malaysians.

The ambassador, we note, has decided to stick with the same tired and indefensible points in defence of his country’s policy on Palestine-Israel. We totally reject those points.

The framing of the occupation of Palestine by Israel as a conflict between two equal sides, with the US doing its utmost as an honest broker to bring a peaceful resolution, has no bearing whatsoever with reality.

Persisting with such a framing is an attempt to delude the Malaysian public.

One side, Israel is the occupying state, enormously powerful with the diplomatic, economic and military backing of the US and the West and the other side, the Palestinians are the occupied people, militarily defenceless and at the mercy of the Israelis.

We point out to anyone, including the ambassador, who keeps mentioning ‘Israel’s right to self-defence’ that under international law Israel as an occupying power has no right to self-defence while the Palestinians as an occupied people do have that right.

This myth of Israel’s right to self-defence has been used as an incitement to genocide. It should be put in the dustbin.

By continuing to supply weapons to Israel to enable it to continue with its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza and providing diplomatic cover to Israel at the United Nations, the US is complicit in the death of more than 40,000 Palestinians.

This is the appalling reality which continues even as this is being written. No one in his or her right mind would claim that the US is acting as an honest broker trying to bring peace to the region.

The ambassador, like a good Zionist shill, still tries to pull a fast one and pretend that history started on Oct 7, 2023.

No, sir, the history of the immense suffering of the Palestinian people started 76 years ago with the Nakba.

What happened on Oct 7, 2023, was, to use a cliché, the chicken coming home to roost.

The decades of brutal Israeli occupation with impunity granted to the occupiers to kill innocent Palestinian men, women and children, steal Palestinian land, starve and conduct ethnic cleansing have produced an explosion which should be expected of any group of human beings subjected to such horrendous conditions.

The ambassador asked for a condemnation of Oct 7. No, sir, you won’t get that from us.

No one has the moral right to condemn what imprisoned and oppressed people do in response to their seven-decade-long oppression, an oppression which is well-documented and known to the whole world.

No one can say that the population of Gaza did not try to end their inhumane open-air imprisonment, for it has been described as such, peacefully. They did in the Great Return March of 2018.

The Israelis responded by using sharpshooters to kill 299 Palestinian men, women and children, including the handicapped and medical workers.

The world chose to remain indifferent and the Israelis got the implicit message that they have impunity over their barbaric conduct.

And the ambassador, like a Piers Morgan wannabe, is still asking people to condemn what happened on Oct 7, last year – as if nothing had happened before that date.

After Oct 7, 2023, on the other hand, the ongoing genocide by the Israelis against Palestinians in Gaza has taken the lives of more than 40,000 civilians including 16,000 children and 10,000 women.

Israel has killed 160 journalists, 500 medical workers, 100 Islamic preachers and destroyed 24 hospitals, 604 mosques and 3 churches.

Almost all schools and universities have been destroyed.

All these are documented and supported by mountainous evidence.

We await the unequivocal condemnation of these barbaric Israeli war crimes by the US ambassador to Malaysia.

Absent such a condemnation, we will know that his pronouncements on the issue are to be treated with a shovelful of salt.

He claims that boycotts sparked by the genocide have not been effective in improving matters in Gaza. We ask that he doesn’t try to insult our intelligence.

It is astounding that such a claim can come from a person whose country’s history, from the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement, was shaped by boycotts.

Boycotts have even been described as an American tradition. For the uninitiated, it is a form of protest whereby the means which is the discourse that opens hearts and minds, is just as important as the outcome.

You don’t stop just because it appears to be ineffective. You keep going till it is effective.

On this note, we urge all Malaysians to maintain their boycott efforts against all the BDS targets.

Do not give your money to entities which support and enable the Gaza genocide.

Every small thing that you can do to help the Palestinian cause which you do not bother to do will give a big victory to the Zionists and genocide-enablers.

The ambassador's attempt to disparage the effectiveness of boycotts is belied by the fact that anti-BDS laws have been passed in 38 states in the US, all induced by Zionist-supporting parties fearful of the impact the BDS campaign would have on American support for Israel.

If boycotts are not effective, why bother to pass such laws?

The ambassador again used the welfare of employees of targeted companies as an argument against boycotts.

Please read our open letter to him of April this year for our response to that argument.

We take this opportunity to ask all Americans, including the ambassador, to realise that the unconditional support for Israel granted by the US government in its executive and legislative branches carries with it great costs to their country and themselves.

First, the US through its complicity in the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza has lost its moral standing throughout the globe.

There is no way the US can preach or lecture the rest of the world about democracy, human rights and supposedly enlightened values when you are supporting, if not openly participating in, a genocide which has killed 15,000 children, among others.

You give diplomatic protection to a country which is blatantly breaching international law and committing war crimes.

You even honour a war criminal by inviting him to speak to your lawmakers.

How can the US pretend to stand for anything progressive and enlightened any longer?

How long can Americans stand the sight of their ambassadors and envoys speaking out in support of genocide?

Second, the US is becoming a dysfunctional democracy. That’s assuming it was a democracy in the first place.

Poll after poll shows that 61 per cent of Americans oppose the supply of weapons to Israel and yet after every massacre of Palestinians, American politicians rush to supply the Israelis with more weapons.

They fear their Zionist paymasters more than their voters.

Third, the civil liberties much vaunted by Americans as the freedom that sets them apart from other societies are slowly being eroded at the behest of the Zionists.

Note the anti-BDS laws which strike down the 2nd Amendment rights of Americans to freedom of political expression.

Fourth, US taxpayers' money, in the billions, is endlessly given to Israel to allow it to continue as a settler-colonial apartheid regime.

Money to buy weapons to kill Palestinians and grant Israelis things which Americans themselves would not mind having such as free college and housing and medical care.

This situation will continue unless American voters force their politicians to place their welfare above the interests of the Zionists.

Finally, US politicians beholden to Israeli interests will have no compunction in sending young American men and women to die for Israel in wars started by Israel against its neighbours.

The US presidency and Congress are like a runaway train in their blind support for Israel. It may well end in the loss of thousands of American lives on the altar of Zionism.

We end this with a wish of Happy Merdeka Day to all Malaysians and ask that everyone pray for the Palestinians to have their own Merdeka soon.

Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Malaysia (BDS Malaysia).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Sinar Daily.