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WHY IS NIKKI HALEY SCRAWLING GENOCIDAL MESSAGES ON ISRAELI BOMBS?  
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Moustafa Bayoumi
May 29, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Haley writing ‘finish them’ on an Israeli bomb is everything
horrific about the US elite’s morally empty foreign policy _

Nikki Haley seen writing a message on an Israeli shell to be used
against people of Gaza., Posted on X

 

This past Sunday night, an Israeli assault struck displaced
Palestinians sheltering in tents outside of Rafah, in northern Gaza.
The barrage killed at least 45 people in a hellish blaze, according
to medics
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witnesses, with many of the dead children charred or dismembered
beyond recognition. “We pulled out children who were in pieces,”
Mohammed Abuassa, who rushed to the scene, told
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Associated Press. “The fire in the camp was unreal,” he said. The
strike provoked another round of international outrage at Israel’s
actions in Gaza. (Israel says it’s investigating.)

Not long after, on Tuesday, the former Republican presidential
candidate Nikki Haley was all over social media for a picture taken of
her during a visit to Israel. In the picture, Haley – the one
Republican who had been frequently lauded for her smarts
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foreign policy – is seen squatting down in front of a row of Israeli
artillery shells, likely provided by the United States, with pen in
hand. “Finish them,” she wrote
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shells.

The evidence indicates that Nikki Haley can write, but one must wonder
if she can read. For months, report
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international human rights organizations and jurists have
documented one
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war crime after another
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South Africa has petitioned
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top court, the international court of justice, three times to compel
Israel to stop its current campaign in Gaza on the grounds that Israel
is committing the crime of all crimes, genocide. Each time, the court
has generally (and overwhelmingly) ruled in South Africa’s favor,
the latest
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being a call that Israel cease its current campaign in Rafah.

Meanwhile, the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court is
also seeking arrest warrants
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the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Israeli
minister of defense, Yoav Gallant, along with the Hamas leaders Yahya
Sinwar, Mohammed Deif and Ismail Haniyeh, for crimes against humanity.

Rather than pursue the path of justice to bring about a sustained
peace, a position that would befit a former US ambassador to the
United Nations (which she is), Haley chooses to venerate the Israeli
war machine by literally writing a sociopathic message on the weapons
that have repeatedly been used to kill an estimated 15,000 Palestinian
children over more than seven months.

Haley is hardly unique, either. Hers is the position of the American
ruling class. “Biden provides the shells. Republicans autograph
them,” the Greek political commentator Yanis Varoufakis noted
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known as Twitter. “The US political class is united in its
complicity with this genocide.”

What makes this genocidal unity of Democrat and Republican all the
more horrific and rage-inducing is that, despite the war-mongering
messages emanating from America’s politicians and media pundits, all
the polls repeatedly show that the American people want a ceasefire in
Gaza, not a genocide. One of the latest surveys, a Data for Progress
poll published
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early May, found that seven out of 10 likely voters “support the US
calling for a permanent ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in
Gaza”. This position was endorsed by majorities of Democrats (83%),
independents (65%) and Republicans (56%).

But you won’t hear such a position from either the Democratic or
Republican leadership, even if their voters endorse it. Instead, we
get the same tired politics and predictable genuflections to party at
the price of basic morality. Why should we expect anything different?
After all, Haley recently announced
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she would vote for Donald Trump for president after having previously
called him “unhinged
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and “not qualified
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The Biden administration’s cynical support
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Israel – while Biden’s so-called “red line
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to Israel’s invasion of Rafah evaporates like disappearing ink –
is even worse behavior.

But principles still matter. To that point, the US-based Lemkin
Institute for Genocide Prevention speaks more for Americans than the
very politicians we have elected to represent us. On the same day that
Haley was signing bombs as if they were love letters, the
institute posted
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statement on social media.

“Let us be clear: Israel is committing genocide in Gaza,” the
institute said. “The US is complicit in genocide. These are not
political statements. They are statements that are made from knowledge
and experience. Nevertheless, you do not need a PhD, a law degree, or
X-ray vision to see the genocidal dimensions of Israel’s carnage in
Gaza.”

The institute concluded their position this way: “Humanity has a
choice: Either we decide that our children can all be killed whenever
a superior force alleges that ‘terrorists’ are among us, or we
decide that under no circumstances will we allow these superior forces
to lay waste to our world any longer. We each must choose and act
accordingly. The watershed moment is now.”

The Lemkin Institute exhibits the kind of moral clarity that we must
demand from our leaders. If we don’t, the Nikki Haleys of this world
will be signing more than bombs. By endorsing the genocide that the
people don’t support, these politicians are also signing the death
certificate of our own democracy.

_Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It
Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim
American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is Professor of
English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. _

* Israel-Gaza War
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* Nikki Haley
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* Israel bombing
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