Anarchistcook’s Weblog

The call for the genocide of the Indigenous people. – Could America’s demonized homeless be next?

Homeless prisoners at the Dachau Death Camp

“If we shot a dog we would be fined 2,000 shekels but if we killed a Palestinian there wouldn’t even be an inquiry since Palestinians aren’t considered human.” Anna and Evan of Tel Aviv Food Not Bombs – December 2003

“We are fighting human animals” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant October 9, 2023

Tears flow rivers at the carnage. The sociopaths in charge know no shame. Another genocide is necessary and righteous sing the monsters of Washington, London, Brussels and Tel Aviv. After all, just like the native Americans before them, Putin’s Russians and the homeless in our communities today these “aren’t humans like you and I” the title of a study on homeless claimed when Clinton was president. If cutting off all food, water and electricity to one million children hasn’t made it clear enough to everyone, the murder of nearly 500 at the Al-Ahli Baptist hospital in Gaza highlights the official belief of many western leaders that the original people of the Holy Land are less than human.

The five by twenty-five mile Gaza reservation holds over two million Palestinians, half of which are children. Most of these “Human animals” have never been outside the prison walls.

The people of the world know that US President Joe Biden could end this genocide today by threatening to cut off the billions we donate to their military every year. He won’t do it though. Genocide is as American as apple pie.

I resonate with the indigenous people. When I was a child I was blessed to walk the sacred lands of the Hopi before it was desecrated by US coal interests. I experienced the pounding of the Snake Dancers as boys became men. The stone walls of the ancient village of Old Oraibi shared that timeless spirit of the West Bank villages that I have visited.

Tel Aviv Food Not Bombs started by local Jews who refused to join the Israel Defense Forces. They were jailed and when released they organized a “Refusenik” conference. Palestinian farmers invited Food Not Bombs to help provide meals for a two month long Peace Camp on the West Bank. During those weeks they agreed to initiate Anarchists Against the Wall.

I landed at Ben Gurion Airport the same day as the first breach of the wall from the West Bank. Their Wikipedia page states, “A member of Anarchists Against the Wall has described the construction of the barrier as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing, “one of the greatest threats the Palestinian population has known over the last century… which is to make life so appalling for the Palestinian people that they will be left with one choice: move out.” A former IDF soldier Gil was shot in the leg. I found my hosts hunched over a computer in a Jaffa apartment editing a video news report of that days historic action.

If you know where to look it is still possible to see videos of the massacres of Gaza but it may not be the case for long. Governments are implementing laws that will block unofficial information from being shared on social media. The European Union’s Digital Services Act, the U.K.Online Safety Bill (OSB), Ireland’s The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022, and the Restrict Act pending in the United States could make it illegal to support the Palestinians or the demonized Russians on social media with claims of antisemitism or the inciting of violence. Making comments against government policies or expressing support for officially declared enemies of the state is likely to be silenced on social media as a result of these new laws. Elon Musk’s X is already under attack by the European Union. On October 12, 2023, X was given 24 hours to implement the required censorship. So far he has defied this order.

“Today the European Commission services formally sent X a request for information under the Digital Services Act (DSA). This request follows indications received by the Commission services of the alleged spreading of illegal content and disinformation, in particular the spreading of terrorist and violent content and hate speech. The request addresses compliance with other provisions of the DSA as well.”

“Following its designation as Very Large Online Platform, X is required to comply with the full set of provisions introduced by the DSA since late August 2023, including the assessment and mitigation of risks related to the dissemination of illegal content, disinformation, gender-based violence, and any negative effects on the exercise of fundamental rights, rights of the child, public security and mental well-being.”

The effort to conceal the horror of the reality of war, poverty and unhelpful ideas from public view includes our local company Google who is busy deleting YouTube accounts critical of the genocide against the Indigenous people of Palestine and the failure in the US regime change war in Ukraine. This shouldn’t be surprising.

Google’s Chief Legal Officer Halimah DeLaine Prado is no friend of the the dispossessed. Her husband Manuel is the treasurer of the anti-homeless hate group “Take Back Santa Cruz”. A public Records Act request obtained a December 18, 2020 email from Manuel Prado to City Manager Martin Bernal, then Mayor Donna Meyer and Republican City council person Renee Golder included calls to terrorize the “human trash” struggling to survive.

In his recap of their weekly meeting he writes, “Update on why some folks such as Keith McHenry (parked on McPherson) and Alicia Kuhl ( parked on Delaware) have not been towed despite receiving many tickets.”

Alicia was living with her three little children and her disabled husband in an RV next to a vacant lot in an industrial area of Santa Cruz after having been ticketed off of the block long Olive Street at the request of the Prados and friends. If towed her family would have had to move in a tent as the dozens of others have during the Prados successful campaign to have the city tow their only access to shelter. Like many, her family was forced into this stressful condition by an illegal eviction.

I didn’t have any tickets on my car and the only reason I ever drive down McPherson is to pick up bread and pastries at Companion Bakery so it’s a relief that their intelligence is not so great.

Halimah DeLaine Prado’s salary has been reported to be half a million a year plus stocks. Bloomberg Law noted that the person she replaced had a “$51 Million Pay Package.” Her California form 700 says she has over 1,000,000,000 shares of stock in Google’s parent company Alphabet. They slept warm in their $2,606,200, 2,500 square foot home on the ocean while they plotted to torment struggling families who were wakened night after night by the Santa Cruz Police Department and ticketed into financial disaster.

That disregard for the suffering of children living on the streets of her community is mirrored in the policies Halimah DeLaine Prado’s legal team seems to endorse at Google removing YouTube channels expressing compassion for the indigenous people of Palestine while letting those channels airing calls for their genocide spread like wildfire. Stoking hate, hate of the “other,” “the useless eaters,” “the human animals.”

Halimah DeLaine Prado

“Eliminate them” barks presidential candidate and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley on Fox TV. In an interview on Fox News, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said: “We’re in a religious war here. I am with Israel, do whatever the hell you have to do to defend yourself “level the place.”

Israel Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly.”

And those are just a few of the more well known calls for genocide of over two million people of which one million are children.

Supporters of the Israeli Occupation scream “savages”, “bugs”, or “animals” while demanding the last of Palestinian people living on what’s left of their homeland be exterminated. Not one peep condemning these horrific calls for ethnic cleansing from the Biden administration.

Sound familiar? One of the first genocides of Indigenous people executed by Europeans was carried out in the Americas where over 20 million nonhuman “savages” were slaughtered, poisoned or starved to death. Gaza, the West Bank, the 100,000 Armenians driven from Artsakh in September and the homeless camps of America cleared everyday are just a modern edition of the dehumanization required to justify the clearing of a people off the face of the Earth.

The failure of public figures to denounce the call to exterminate the Palestinian people is chilling.

Our homeless friends are frequently described as less than human by political leaders, members of the media, the Prados and their friends in the local anti homeless hate groups of Take Back Santa Cruz or Seabright Strong . Ten minutes on Deborah Elston’s moderated Nextdoor.com and you are likely to read some of the ugliest dehumanizing calls to clean out the “trash.” Elston is the principle volunteer police officer who targeted Alicia and her family’s vehicular home with a blizzard of tickets during the 2020 holiday season.

Eric Harris of the Grant Park neighborhood had no fear of social ostracization when he posted this on Nextdoor.com, “Most of Ross Camp parasites are criminals and can’t vote, much like the illegals this town harbors.” In a Facebook thread suggesting the formation of a vigilante group Mike Julian writes in all caps, “FEMA CAMP” and gets two thumbs up.

The City of Santa Cruz takes the dehumanization of those who can’t afford housing to another level passing laws against sleeping outside and banning RV’s from parking overnight. A small army of police and public works employees are draining that $14 million state donation in an unrelenting campaign of “sweeping clean” the sleeping spots of our dear fellow humans. Listen to any City Council debate on the “homeless problem” and the hatred flows freely. You won’t hear Mayor Fred Keeley silence those voices as he did during the CACH committee meetings that have been used to justify the city’s terror.

As Alicia’s family was enduring the nightly harassment a COVID pandemic was announced. The response by the City of Santa Cruz was to erect chain link cages for the homeless in downtown parking lots. In the Sentinel story, “Santa Cruz coronavirus ‘triage centers’ in the works for city’s unsheltered population” explains, “The city plans to open as many as seven outdoor city triage centers on an as-needed basis, temporarily housing between 10 to 15 people per site for about as long as 72 hours, Susie O’Hara said. The first such site opens Friday in city Lot 17, on Laurel Street across from the Kaiser Permanente Arena. A next intake site is likely on Coral Street near Housing Matters, where the right-of-way soon will be closed to allow for a Homeless Persons Health Project health triage area expansion, O’Hara said.” The same article reports that California Gov. Gavin Newsom set aside $50 million to place the homeless in hotels but our city took months to do so because the homeless are seen as less than human by those in charge. My dear friend Bob Reese didn’t make it and died with his C-PAP machine in his backpack.

In a miniature version of the starvation policies of Israel on the Gaza Strip based on the same mind set Santa Cruz City Manager and Second Harvest Treasurer Matt Huffaker and then Second Harvest Community Liaison and Take Back Santa Cruz officer Richelle Noroyan cut off their weekly deliveries of food to their second largest agency Food Not Bombs. They justified their intentional severing of relations because the IRS had not posted our 990s on their website during the COVID lockdown even though we provided the Second Harvest staff with proof of our current valid nonprofit status Huffaker even used this move to contact Lookout Santa Cruz’s Chris Neely to feed him a story about our returning to our weekend schedule because of his successful removal of Food Not Bombs, the one group who provided the only daily meal for hundreds of people for the three years St Francis Soup Kitchen was closed and could only offer a bagged sandwich. Instead of thanking Food Not Bombs for protecting downtown from the inevitable looting by hundreds of desperate people. They cut off food to Food Not Bombs with the stated goal of starving the homeless.

Now that everyone is welcome to proudly demand the genocide of people of the Holy Land without concern of being embarrassed how long will it be before such calls will move from the horror of police sweeps to more Draconian measures against the homeless? The long feared FEMA camps will seem human compared to the 56 years in the pre-genocide concentration camp of Gaza. Our good liberals will bark that we treat our vermin better here than the Israelis.

It won’t be long before another few thousand people will be forced to move to the doorways, levee banks and parks of Santa Cruz. The Wall Street Journal reported that the number of people who became homeless increased by 11% in the first eight months of 2023 compared with all of 2022. The US Census announced child poverty more than doubled in 2023 from the year before. More children we don’t care about like those who disappeared in the Maui fire or under the thousands of bombs raining down on Gaza.

Political leaders have no plan to aid the people of the United States letting millions of us to become homeless. I have been flooded with more than a dozen calls a day from desperate seniors living in rural America who have no food. Their health insurance company gave them a $100 debit card that they thought would be refilled each month only to discover it was a trick to have them sign up for their plan. The number on the back of the card directs them to a call center that passes on my number. They often complain that we can send billions to Ukraine but can’t take care of our own people.

How will the Prados and their allies respond as the number of people pitching tents and sleeping in the doorways of Santa Cruz grows by the thousands as it surely will as prices for food, housing and gas skyrocket. President Biden and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen tell us we can afford two wars but our government demands means testing for a useless housing voucher and SNAP food stamps that never pay for a month’s worth of groceries.

The callousness with which the “good” people are cheering on the genocide of the Palestinians suggests that those same “good” people will be fine with locking America’s less than human homeless in concentration camps. The former mayor who held weekly meetings with Manuel Prado proposed at a two-by-two meeting with county officials that they should ship our town’s homeless 122 miles south to Camp Roberts in San Miguel. If that happens will anyone have the courage to stop the authorities?

The inevitable cruelty of a World War fueled by calls for genocide could unleash the unthinkable in this atmosphere of any atrocity goes.

Many in Canada already support the concept of self extermination of their unhoused. A headline in the National Post reports on May 16, 2023, that “One third of Canadians fine with prescribing assisted suicide for homelessness” referring to Canada’s program Medical Assistance in Dying – MAiD. Hundreds have already “taken advantage” of this option rather than face the harsh winters of the Canadian streets.

Will this sanctioned hatred of the Palestinians, Armenians and Russians pave the way of removal of America’s homeless into internment camps? By the time you read this the conflict in Palestine may have erupted into a global war. Access to Persian Gulf oil may have been disrupted, tumbling the economy into chaos. Food shortages could increase. Official hatred of immigrants and homeless may increase as the number of people living on our streets is too much to ignore. Will officials be forced to ration food and those “useless eaters” in the FEMA camps be allowed to starve for “national security” purposes? I fear so.

Thankfully hundreds of thousands of people are on the streets calling for an end to the genocide, demanding western leaders recognize those being slaughtered as flesh and blood humans.

We can only hope fellow Americans will stand against the forced removal of our homeless neighbors into the internment camps and denounce the dehumanizing rhetoric before the tragedy of World War III opens the doors of hell.

Keith McHenry – keith@foodnotbombs.net