Already, Gaza has faded from the front pages of the Western press. Already it is yesterday's news, yesterday's massacre, just another in a long, long, endless line of human debauchery. After all, the Western press, the Western establishments, indeed, Western popular opinion, have often countenanced -- even championed -- far worse atrocities. The establishments and power structures of most Arab nations are also hastening to forget, to downplay, to bury, once again, the suffering of the Palestinians, in the interests of political gamesmanship, both domestic and diplomatic.The reality of the actual human beings in Palestine who have been inflicted with horrific suffering matter no more than the reality of the human beings in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Kurdistan, or Chechnya, or Colombia, or Sri Lanka, or Burma, or the Congo, or anywhere else on the far-flung earth where the machines of power wring the blood and terror that is their fuel from the flesh of men and women and children. (And this geography of suffering includes the sacred Homeland itself, of course, where, for example, more than two million citizens are now held in cages, most of them for the "crime" of temporarily deranging their senses to escape the pain of the world that power has made.)

What do the men and women and children of Gaza matter to these brokers and drivers of power? Why speak of Gaza -- where the relentless and ruthless Israeli assault on civilians ended almost precisely with the ascension of Barack Obama to high office -- when that newly-ascended embodiment of hope is already drawing first blood in his marshalship of the "War on Terror"? Already, Obama has ordered his first drone missile attacks on the sovereign territory of Pakistan, an American ally; already he has killed his first civilians with the faceless, soulless weapons of remote-control mass death.