Declan Hayes
Although some McDonalds outlets have been subjected to sporadic protests, such as those in England where mice were released inside them, those protests miss the wider humanitarian mark.
When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things. ( 1 Corinthians 13:11)
One of those childish things the great Syrian apostle St Paul did away with was McDonald's hamburgers, which children lucky enough not to be encased under the rubble of Gaza or St Paul's own Syria regard as a treat and which we, who have long ago given up such childish things, occasionally like to indulge them with.
Although the corpulent West infamously overdo such treats, Gaza's problem, like Tigray's problem or Syria's problem, is the converse. Their children have nothing, not even scraps of bread to sustain them as George Galloway pointed out at the start of his January 17th show, where he JUDGING ISRAEL - MOATS with George Galloway Ep 309 , who could have been no more than 3 or 4 years old, shuffling around in the rubble, delighted to have been offered a slice of bread to keep her going.
Although I have previously addressed this issue in the case of the late Sr Brigid Doody, for whose cause of helping impoverished Syrian children I still accept donations, Sr Doody, who was a trained and experienced nurse, pointed out to me that when children like that little Gazan princess are deprived of calcium and similar essentials, they are scarred for life. I have seen the consequences of such deprivations amongst Japan's wartime survivors and they are not pretty.
In Syria, I met lovely young Armenian mothers, who had to get out of Dodge for the sake of their little children. Although, if I were to cop it in cross fire or in a bomb blast, I would hope to go to my "Gawd" like Kipling's soldier, it is different for children and their protective mothers, who would sacrifice their lives for their little angels to enjoy the sunny side of the street even once before Israel martyrs them.
Children, as any parasitic NGO knows, make good propaganda and it is in this context that we must look at these exclusive photos the New York Times took of children no less a figure than Russian President Putin, together with Mother Russia, supposedly abducted from the front lines of the Ukrainian war. These photos belong more in Vogue or some similar fashion photo shoot, as they are totally posed and are as far from the griminess of the Ukrainian or Gazan wars as is a trip to your local McDonalds.
Against the charges that they are supplying free meals to Israeli soldiers in Gaza as well as to the Israeli soldiers' children back home, McDonalds recently released 𝕏 this press statementwhere they denounce the "misinformation and inaccurate reports" they are being subjected to. Although the statement says "McDonalds Corporation is not funding or supporting any governments" involved in the Gaza genocide, that is not the particular charge that has nothing to do with the hate speech "red herring" McDonalds' self-serving statement throws into the mix.
Though their critics object to them 𝕏 siding with Israeli Army personnel, just as Coca Cola famously did with the US Marines and Coca Cola's Fanta franchise did with the Nazis, that is not my primary objection, which is encapsulated in this famous photo of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a Vietnamese child snapped running naked down a road flanked by Mickey Mouse and Ranald McDonald after the Yanks napalmed her.
Although the litigious prone McDonalds mob could say that Vietnamese montage was "misinformation and inaccurate reports," it does capture the essence of what such American companies are all about.
As does McDonalds own Twitter feed, which has an incredible 4.7 million followers, evidence, perhaps, that at least 4.7 million Americans have too much time on their hands. For the truth is that McDonalds, Coca Cola and companies like them are as much parasites on the Americans as they are on anybody else.
Although Finian Cunningham wrote a recent cracking piece to salute MLK day, the night before King was assassinated, he was in Atlanta to address a strike at its Coca Cola plant. Though Coca Cola now leading MLK celebrations is just further evidence of American corporate hypocrisy at its finest, the hypocrisy of Ronald McDonald's war on Gaza is of a much more Satanic scale and it is the reason that the British soldiers who liberated Belsen beat its guards to death.
Although I despise George Monbiot even more than I do other Guardian journalists, he did write one excellent piece on the horrific murder of April Jones, an angelic Welsh toddler, who was abducted from the green in front of her family home. Speaking to a Welsh friend with insights into such things, it was explained to me that such atrocities are not as spontaneous as they may appear to be, that the perpetrators, be they British, Irish, German or Israeli, are first groomed, either by themselves or by others into being human devils. One simply does not automatically become a mass murderer, in the case of Jews, after one's bar mitzvah. One is groomed into it by the incessant and insidious words of criminal states like Israel and the plastic brain profit at all costs corporate ideology of American outfits like McDonalds and Coca Cola, which is good for cleaning toilets and not much else.
Although some McDonalds outlets have been subjected to sporadic protests, such as those in England where mice were released inside them, those protests, to me at least, miss the wider humanitarian mark. That wider mark is that Welsh children like April Jones and others like George Galloway's little Gazan princess are entitled as an obvious matter of right to their share of the sunny side of the street.
Most Israelis have been groomed to reject that simple truism and the fruits of that grooming can be seen in the criminal actions of the Israeli Army in Gaza, where they delight in looting and pillaging little girls' rooms. But it is also evident in the plastic, unthinking, shuttered world corporations like McDonalds and Coca Cola blinker us with.
𝕏 McDonalds' statement claims "our hearts are with all the communities and families impacted by this [Gazan] crisis". But that, I contend, is not true, as McDonalds does not have a heart. All it has is a Belsen-like review of its quarterly earnings which, in the case of Israel, it feels can best be maximised by gifting little Jewish youngsters Big Macs, and freedom fries, whilst those angelic Gazans fortunate enough to have survived so far subsist on rainwater, and scraps of stale bread. And, though many agree with that diabolical hypocrisy, they should not be in the least surprised why groups like Hamas such a lethal response to Ranald McDonald's war on the little angels of Gaza.