Unacceptable For US to Boycott Nagasaki’s Memorial for Atom Bomb Victims Because Israel Was Not Invited

ACCORDING TO LIZ - That the United States, Great Britain and other purportedly democratic nations would even consider boycotting Nagasaki’s memorial service because the Israeli ambassador was not invited is despicable. 

Less about statesmanship and more on the level of a six-year-old’s tantrum because their best friend was excluded. 

Not that the Netanyahu-led country has ever been a real friend to anyone; it just courts the support, by methods fair and foul, of those who might be deceived into furthering its self-interested and too-often blood-stained political ends.

In gross violation of the Geneva Conventions, Israel has slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza, with over a hundred thousand more missing or maimed. Approximately seventy percent of these are women and children. 

When all war-related deaths are considered, British medical journal The Lancet is projecting a death toll closer to 200,000. A number that will climb stratospherically if Israel caves to demand from many of its ministers and officials to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, turning it into a “slaughterhouse” and “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth.”  

Especially ironic given the Nagasaki Peace Memorial Ceremony is intended to mark the 79th anniversary of the US atomic bomb attacks on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. 

This is supposed to be a solemn ceremony to pay respect to the victims of America’s dropping of the “Fat Man” bomb which murdered tens of thousands of civilians and condemned many, many more to slow and painful deaths. 

Not an occasion for political grandstanding in support for Israeli genocidal obliteration of Gaza. 

That Rahm Emanuel, the US ambassador whose father was a member of Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organization that operated in Palestine prior to the birth of Israel, might choose to step back in these circumstances is one thing, especially if the American government sends an equally senior representative in his place.  

But then for the ambassadors or chargé d’affaires of Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and the European Union to pile in on disrespecting Japan’s right to refuse representatives of nations like Israel and Russia who act beyond the pale of civilized society by sending a letter threatening to withdraw high-level participation from the event is... equally beyond the pale. 

If the powerful, wealthy countries of the world wish to protest anything, they should be protesting Israel’s Nazi-style oppression of the Palestinians which is totally outside the rule of law and the bounds of humanity, and cutting off all support of any kind until the spoiled stepchild of the Holocaust retreats from its current unacceptable aggressions and reclaims respect for the tenets of Yahweh.

(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions.  In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)