Gaza may be compared to Philadelphia, America’s first capital.  The size of their urban population is 1.5 million. The rest of the analogy goes even further but it only applies to certain destitute parts of Philadelphia, namely the actual ghettos found in North and West Philly.

If the authorities under the pretense of fighting crime decided to bomb those neighborhoods such a prospect would horrify us.  Even if there were calls from the mainstream media to “limit civilian casualties”, just like the faint-hearted and lonely editorial of the New York Times entitled “War Over Gaza”, it would be preposterous even entertaining that “some” or “limited” innocent casualties should even be acceptable.

Just how unfathomable is it to bomb a poor neighborhood riddled with crime or extremism?  Actually, on May 13, 1985 right in West Philadelphia, Mayor Wilson Goode ordered a bomb to be dropped to settle a confrontation between the Police and ‘Move’ a black movement regarded as a cult.   The aftermath of the bombing was 11 dead, 62 row houses incinerated and 250 residents left homeless.

Gaza is trapped in a far worse predicament than West Philadelphia.  Poverty and crime there are coupled with famine.  “We knew that 1.5 million inhabitants of Gaza were being starved,” stated ex US President Jimmy Carter in his column published in the Washington Post, a perception confirmed by the Red Cross and the grisly find this week of 15 bodies and several emaciated children.

The faint official voice of the New York Times through its editorial is somewhat compensated by one of its columnist Roger Cohen, who courageously denounces “I have never previously felt so despondent about Israel, so shamed by its actions,” and how it “prevented international journalist getting into Gaza to tell the story as they see it”.

Hundreds of civilians have been murdered by the Israeli campaign; innocent children have been murdered under the pretext of firing back at Hamas militants using civilians as a human shield.    Anyone vested with a decent heart should avoid the self-delusion of referring to the death of the innocent as being mere “casualties”. The poor, the “undesirable” cannot simply be walled off, fenced, as a means to addressing the true causes of injustice, poverty, and suffering.

To be fair with an otherwise stalwart of real journalism, the New York Times own voice, its editorial, has been clear, forceful, even inspiring when it came to denouncing the absurdity of the war in Iraq, the monstrosity of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo, and the condemning of the onslaught on immigrants in America.   Courageous journalism begins with calling abject and absurd things by their true name.