The following is the email I just sent to my former employer in New York City, owner of Griffin360 Public Relations. He is reachable at bob@griffin360.com and I do not feel compelled to wait for his response. I am now naming and shaming the rich, apathetic Americans in my personal life because I don't want to use a gun. I don't want to go to an embassy. I don't want to be a global pariah or hero, depending on your views.

But I want this to stop all the same. I want the power structures to fall and for the opulence we live under to be revealed as the genocidal force it has always been. I want Palestine to be free and I want justice for all - true, unadulterated justice for all the injustice that has been, continues to be and will be perpetuated in pursuit of white supremacy and domination. When you read this, consider if I may also be talking to you.

Did you do anything? Did you actually stretch your muscles and expend your breath, did your molecules move in such a way as to attempt protection for the 14,000 babies? And if not, will you? Will you now? Tomorrow? Next week?

I hope you enjoy this. Because I don't enjoy anything anymore.

No subject line, no greeting:

Did you do anything in response to the imminent murder of 14,000 babies, Bob? Did you do anything?

Do you still think you're fighting for social justice and equality around the world?

Did you do anything?

Did you call your senator Chuck Schumer? Your Governor Kathy Hochul? Your Mayor Eric Adams?

Did you do anything?

Did you make any demands of your government you undoubtedly supported? Did you talk to any of your clients? Did you change your schedule? Was your ability to complete work affected by this news? Did you do anything?

When I shared the UN report in the Guardian on Tuesday, now three days past, I sent it to hundreds of contacts in government, technology, family, friends, colleagues... Do you want to know the ONLY response I received? It came from a former friend of 25 years, a former Catholic turned Jewish-marriage-convert who immediately became Zionist, as his wife was and is. This was his response to my clearly desperate plea for humanity to prove it still exists and is worth fighting for by standing up for all these babies. This is what he said:

That's Zionism. That's mainstream American Judaism. That's Christian Zionism. It is a death cult. Zionism is a death cult. Israel, as envisioned by the founder of modern Zionism Theodore Herzl, is a violent settler colonial apartheid genocide machine, a system of perpetual oppression and religious ethnic supremacy dependent on the brutal subjugation and dehumanization of a permanent ethnic minority.

I haven't published anything about my work history with Griffin and my complicity in the regression of the U.S. and the oppression of the Palestinians because I haven't had a moment to breathe in months. Every waking hour is agonizing. It's 3:50 in the morning here. And I know that in the few hours of sleep I managed, thousands of children may have been murdered by my own elected representatives, with their money and their permission, their apathy and their repeated undeniably racist decisions to support Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people. How am I to sleep? How am I to eat? How am I to find joy in taste or touch or smell when I speak with young parents in Gaza who are watching their children waste away as the Jews did 80 years ago? Where am I to find solace or relief? Among what leaders?

My own cousin is among those Israelis. He told me all Palestinians want to kill me. That is what Israel teaches its kids, and what American Zionist Judaism indoctrinates into the youth here. He was raised in California, and now as an old man he moved to Israel and posts thing slike this to social media:

Have you used your curious mind to learn about Zionism? Have you tapped your formidable intellect to contemplate the creation of a state through the explicit intentional military and political act of ethnic cleansing?

We had an American Jewish college student in Denver report that he was afraid he would be shot because someone said the words occupier and occupied in comments after a film screening. He felt so personally attacked by a foreign state being called an occupier because his entire upbringing and education had led him to believe he is the perpetual victim, always at threat and in danger, constantly on the verge of extinction and besieged by Arab and Muslim hate and avarice.

Yet the Proud Boys March through our streets with nary a word of concern from our elected officials, the mass murder of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pennsylvania receiving no action of national outrage against the Christian religious teachings or white skin of the perpetrator. Yet all Muslims must be to blame when a single Israeli is killed. All Palestine supporters are guilty when a pair of Israeli embassy workers who openly called for the mass murder of Israel's opponents are killed.

I included you and your son in a blast of hundreds of emails I sent about the imminent starvation murders of 14,000 babies. Did you do anything? If it was 1941 and the word Palestinian had been replaced with Jewish, would you have done anything? Do you take offense to the comparison? Is there some difference between the babies of Gaza 2025 and the babies of Warsaw 1941 or the babies of Auschwitz 1944?

Have you donated any of your millions to save their lives? Did you do anything? Did you use your network of contacts and your wealth to smuggle anyone out to safety? Did you do anything?

Do you envision yourself as someone who would have helped the Franks evade Nazi capture in World War II? When that opportunity came with millions of nameless innocent Gazans livestreamed to your phone and your desktop for 595 days straight, did you make secret rooms for them? Did you huddle in dark corners to establish routes of transfer and human smuggling to save their lives? Did you do anything?

This is all I do. I don't have millions of dollars or networks of millionaire contacts, I don't have multiple homes in which I could shelter dozens of refugees. All I have is mountains of righteous moral outrage and endless shame, a loud voice and a decent mastery of language, an ability to discern truth from fiction and propaganda from reality, a desire to spread knowledge and empathy in a world distinctly and increasingly dismissive of both.

Did you watch Israelism? Did you watch the Oscar winning documentary No Other Land? Did you watch the Palestinian director of that film be kidnapped and beaten by the Israeli army upon returning to his home simply for having the temerity to speak? Did you speak out when the United States government did nothing about it?

Do you watch the Israeli Jewish settlers armed and protected by the Israeli government abuse, threaten and kill West Bank residents every day to steal their lands? Do you see your grandchildren in the shredded corpses, the emaciated skeletons, the bits and pieces of children strewn across the rubble we have wrought, never once named or recovered, buried or fully mourned? Do you ever look at their faces? Do you know any of their names?

Did you do anything?

When a 14-year-old New Jersey boy named Omar Mohammed Saada Rebea was executed by the IDF, did you call your senators and your Congress representative to ask how this could happen with no official condemnation, opposition, revulsion, expulsion, rescission?

I went to Washington D.C. recently to protest by myself. I met and walked the halls of Congress with Medea Benjamin, one of the bravest women in this country today who recently worked with Ben Cohen and the founders of Doctors Against Genocide, now all arrested for daring to humanize Palestinians and crying out for the U.S. government, to try to force our leaders to use all the tools and means at their disposal to stop what will undoubtedly be viewed by future historians as a second Holocaust.

Did you do anything?

If you did nothing when you heard 14,000 babies were going to starve to death with the help of your personal elected representatives whom I know you voted for and maybe even donated to, where am I to find daylight between the legacy of you and that of someone like Donald Trump or Pam Bondi? How do I discern your family from that of the early 1900s German aristocrats driving Mercedes and attending opulent galas during the attempted extermination of my forebears? If there were another Nazi rally held today in Madison Square Garden, it need not feature swastikas or sieg heils, only a flag of blue and white emblazoned with the Magen David and a chant of Am Yisrael Chai, a handshake between your state’s and nation's leaders of both "liberal" and "conservative" persuasions.

Did you do anything? Or did you look at my email and think "how could he care so deeply about the Gazan children when there are so many good Israeli Jews paying for my next Italian luxury vacation? How dare he compel me to consider the humanity of Muslim children and reckon with my own outsized ability to help them, which I refuse to enact? How dare he. He must be an anti-semite. A self-hating Jew. He must be Hamas."

What have you learned?

Did you do anything? When you are called to return to the ashes from whence we all came, will your personal vision of God look upon you with disgust at the extravagance in which you wallowed amid an endless sea of suffering and murder?

Will you do anything now? Did you even read this? Did it hurt? Are you now wounded? Will you have to take time off work because of the moral injury? Are you the hero you believe yourself to be? Or are you the most dangerous shade of white liberal warned about by Malcolm X? The bourgeois, the lord of the peasants, the hard-working self-made American dream of exploitation and indifference.

Did you do anything?

Did you?

Did you?

I should ask you 14,000 times.

Did you?

It's now 4:50 in the morning here, and you are no doubt enjoying a lush breakfast or en route to your cozy office adorned with paintings worth tens of thousands of dollars for which you take pride, enjoying all the luxurious comforts that centuries of externalized costs can afford. It's 6:50 where you are. The world is waking up and buzzing with new business. It is 1:50 p.m. in Gaza, and the streets are running red with rivers of blood of the innocent.

People I know may now be dead, buried, dismembered, disintegrated, eviscerated, disappeared, kidnapped, executed. Children I've spoken with may have taken their last gasps as their hearts gave out.

But I hope you enjoy your morning coffee and I hope you wish your Israeli clients well. I hope you tell them antisemitism is dangerous and Israel must be protected. I hope you don't ever feel the full weight of your inaction, your denials, your multiple self-aggrandizing responses of misapplied moral indignation supposedly on MY behalf as a Jewish American. I hope your God forgives you. Because I never will. Never.

So did you do anything? Will you do anything now?

Today no true hope for justice or remediation remains among the carcass of what I thought the world was.

You did nothing. In reality we all did nothing.

May the screams of 14,000 who never uttered a word in this life haunt us until we leave this plane, and forever after. May the souls of hundreds of thousands cast eternal glances upon us in shocked horror at what we became. May we suffer what they suffered.

No justice... No peace.

Enjoy the holiday weekend. I'm sure you deserve it.

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