Start a new world order

WHEN the Germans invaded Poland in 1939, they herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into various ghettos in Poland, the Warsaw Ghetto being the largest with 400 000 Jews trapped inside it.

A 3m-high wall was built around this ghetto, which was closed off to the outside world on November 15 1940.

German policemen from Battalion 61 used to hold victory parties on the days when a large number of desperate prisoners were shot at the ghetto fence.

Is this not happening at the Gaza border as we speak?

Food delivered into the ghetto was restricted to 8% of the calorie intake of the Germans and the only real means of survival for the Jews was to smuggle in food.

The tunnels under the border between Gaza and Egypt are also used to smuggle in desperately needed food and other supplies.

The Gazans are fighting back and in the process are labelled terrorists by the western media.

The Nazi media also labelled Jews who tried to resist as terrorists.

The world always says never again. Not true, it always happens.

There are ghettos in Syria too, where people are starved to death and bombed from the air.

Why are the protocols of the Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights not being implemented?

The reason is simple. The United Nations is a post-colonial project with a Security Council veto held largely by former colonial powers.

The United States uses its veto to protect the apartheid state of Israel, and Russia uses its veto to protect Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship.

Unless the world breaks completely free from its colonial past, scraps the UN Security Council and its colonial veto, and implements a new democratic world order where all nations have an equal vote, we will continue to see these Nazi-like atrocities around the world.

Naushad Omar, Cape Town