“Only if we understand, will we care. Only if we care, will we help. Only if we help, shall all be saved.” JANE GOODALL
Goodall’s quote conveys the idea that understanding wildlife can lead to caring about it, which can lead to helping it, and ultimately saving it.
This holds good for our transactions with other humans. But I’m convinced that we who comprise the human race are not humane.
Being humane is when we want to prevent pain and misery in others. Being humane implies an ethical approach when we seek to alleviate suffering and promote dignity in other humans and animals.
Cruelty, is our more natural state of being. We seem to have a strong desire to kill. We have gone back to the uncouth times when killing was a spectator sport and we have become the bloodthirsty spectators who watch and cheer while brutal killers kill the innocent.
We condone killing, torture, violence, pain and misery without even thinking about it.
Humanity is “the quality of being humane, benevolent”, it means, being kind, compassionate, understanding, sympathetic, empathetic, gentle and generous.
But, I’m sorry to say we don’t know what humanity really means. To us, nowadays, humanity only means that we are human i.e. bipedal primate mammals. We have lost every shred of humanity we had.
How else could we even try to understand why even friends of mine take sides in the one-sided massacre that the European jews who have settled on and who are occupying the indigenous people’s land in Palestine are conducting a pogrom and exterminating the indigenous people of the land.
Those conducting the brutal murders, slaughter, extermination, massacre and rape of innocents in Gaza, Palestine, and carnage in Lebanon and Iran, are not human, whether they are Israeli politicians, or citizens of Israel, or the ‘IDF’, this itself is a misnomer, The ‘Israel Defence Force’ is anything but a defence force, for the last 77 years since 1948, they have been a terrorist force occupying newer and newer areas and have made Gaza a concentration camp. The correct appellation for them is ‘Israeli Terrorist Force’ (ITF). The occupying European jews who have occupied and continue to expand have colonised Palestine, and their partners in crime – the USA, Britain, Canada, Australia and the Arab States, the EU, with the exception of Belgium, Ireland, Luxembourg and Spain – all are complicit in the genocide and crime against humanity.
None of the conspirators – the administration of these countries, and the citizens of these countries – are human. They too are human only in the strict definition of the term human – erect, bipedal primates.
How else can one explain Israels crimes against humanity in their current massacre over the last fourteen months.
Israelis have killed an estimated three hundred thousand Palestinians, from whom they have been stealing homes for around eighty years, expelling, oppressing, imprisoning, torturing, killing, raping and poisoning.
They have been targeting Palestinian journalists, their thinkers, their health care workers, their athletes, their artists; bombed their museums, their hospitals, their universities, their libraries, their cultural centres, their religious places (which include churches, mosques and synagogues).
These horrible people have set-up Observation platforms for Israeli citizens to watch them slaughtering the indigenous people.
They’ve corralled Palestinians by the hundreds of thousands in flimsy tents; bombed them in so-called safe zones and burned them alive. Cut off their food and water and medicine.
Israel has made Palestinian children wander barefoot with empty pots. Made them gather the flesh of their parents in plastic bags – to bury their siblings, their cousins their friends.
Israel has terrorised Palestinians so thoroughly that they have lost their hair, their memory, their minds, and they make 4 and 5-year-olds get heart attacks.
They bring flour in trucks for Palestinians to make bread, and open fire on them.
They bring food to shelters in aid trucks for hungry Palestinians and set fire to the entire shelter and the delivery truck.
Israeli snipers brag about blowing out 42 Palestinian knee caps a day, as one Israeli soldier did in 2019.
An Israeli soldier self-confessed to CNN that he ran over hundreds of Palestinians with his tank, their squished flesh lingering in the tank treads.
Palestinians have been forced leg amputations and C – sections without anaesthesia.
Israeli soldiers destroy Palestinian children and decorate their tanks with their toys.
They kill and display women and pose in their lingerie. (they’ve posted this on youTube).
In the 1980’s, and 1990’s Israel sent booby trapped toys into Lebanon that exploded when excited children picked them up.
The preceding has been paraphrasedfrom a speech at the Oxford Union by Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa. All this is Historic record – documented in news reports at the time. In UN reports, in eyewitness testimony, from victim testimony.
Further documented atrocities by the Israelis:
In September 2024 Israel carried out part of its device attack targeting Hezbollah by concealing explosives inside the batteries of pagers brought into Lebanon. CNN – edition.cnn.com/2024/09/27/middleeast/israel-pager-attack-hezbollah-lebanon-invs-intl/index.html
An Israeli airstrike targeted a displacement tent on Thursday in the so-called “humanitarian zone” of al-Mawasi in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis, killing 12 Palestinians and injuring several others. Among the victims were the chief of Gaza’s police force, his assistant, and several children. The attack killed the chief of Gaza’s police force, Mahmud Salah, and his deputy, Hussam Shahwan. Quds News Network 3/1/2025
Targeting Doctors and Hospitals. Killing Life in Gaza -by Palestine Information Centre 6th January 2025
After more than 14 months of the war of extermination on Gaza, the Israeli army continues to target Palestinian medical teams through killing, arrests, torture and disappearances. The latest is the martyrdom of 31-year-old Thabat Ibrahim Muhammad Salim, a volunteer doctor at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, on 5 January, 2025. Since the onset of the extermination war the Israeli army has been continuously targeting hospitals and purposely breaking down the health care system. According to Ministry of Health data published last September, Palestine lost about 1000 health workers, including specialist doctors, surgical and anesthesia technicians, nurses, physical therapy, paramedics, radiology and medical analysis technicians and expert administrators in the field of health sector management. The data also shows the occupation forces arrested and forcibly kidnapped more than 300 people.
Eighth Infant Freezes to Death in Gaza, by Quds News Network 6th Jan 2026
Another Palestinian baby died Sunday from the extreme cold in Gaza, marking the eighth infant to freeze to death in recent nights, as the ongoing Israeli siege worsens the harsh winter conditions, making life uninhabitable. Yousef Kaloub died of hypothermia in the so-called “humanitarian zone” in al-Mawasi in southern Gaza, according to local sources.
At Least 74 Children Killed in Israeli Attacks in Gaza in First Week of New Year: UNICEF by Quds News Network 8th January 2025
Israeli military forces, ITF, are slaughtering, human beings – mothers, fathers, children, doctors, international aid workers, journalists, in Palestine. The innocent are executed and buried in mass graves in hospitals.
Israeli massacre of children in Gaza is “greatest of any conflict in recorded warfare,” UN expert warns – by Andre Damon
(All news items compiled from Countercurrents)
Israel Offensive Forces, IOF, misnamed ‘Israeli Defensive Forces’, have since its existence from 1948 only used offensive force in its aggressive land grabbing and invasions. It is a terrorising army of trained assassins – psychopaths that lack empathy, they lack remorse and are without an iota of conscience.
These possible hominids, these erect, bipedal primates, the terrorising Israeli military forces and their International partners, have killed (according to the controlled media), 130 journalists and media workers, around 200 aid workers among the more than 44,000 (this doesn’t include the thousands that are buried under the rubble of bombed and demolished buildings) human beings in the past year since the Genocide in Gaza began in earnest.
These brutal murderers, the terrorising Israeli military forces, it’s doubtful if they are even hominids, ‘hominid’ refers to all Great Apes, us and our ancestors.
It would be wrong to call them bestial, or animals. It is demeaning to animals. Because all animals are sentient, they perceive, they feel and they exhibit altruism more often than humans. But these Israeli’s and their supporters (both supporting countries and individual supporters, my friends among them) are not sentient. They are psychopathic – The IOF show no remorse for what they are doing, visible to all in their gloating videos on YouTube. And the individual supporters are no less.
These Israeli’s are automatons – machines or robots which perform functions according to a programmed set of coded instructions. Or, perhaps humanoids; a nonhuman creature that looks or acts like a human; hybrid robots, a combination of synthetic components, electronic elements, with living biological materials.
Generally, I don’t discuss this matter with supporters of the genocide, because I can’t – we live in different worlds. They have no empathy or compassion. They live in their own bubble. How can we speak to them!?
Being human is simply understanding that others are human too.
They have equal rights with you and you should treat them as you wish they treat you and you should not treat them in ways that you do not like to be treated. This sounds like something Jesus said.
We will end with a quote from The Book of Mirdad , an allegorical book of philosophy by Lebanese author Mikha’il Nu’ayma, better known in English by his pen name Mikhail Naimy, poet, novelist, and philosopher, famous for his spiritual writings. The book was first published in Lebanon in 1948. Mikhail Naimy and Kalil Gibran were friends.
MIRDAD
to be human is to be full of love.
lovely towards animate and inanimate,
lovely towards living and non-living,
love becomes your state of mind.
you breathe love as unconsciously as you breathe air.
love becomes your state of mind.
that is the meaning of being human.
LOVE
Pratap Antony writes on ecology and environment, social justice and pluralism, management ideas and issues, jazz and western classical music and Indian classical dance.
