Let's look at just one example. From the Jerusalem Post:
Terrorists in Gaza attempted to attack IDF soldiers with an explosives-laden donkey on Friday, the military said.Are they kidding? A lethal military force is murdering civilians in a pathetic strip of land bereft of an army or navy. These people are so thoroughly outmatched, so vulnerable, so miserable that they resort to strapping bombs on a donkey. And we are supposed to feel sorry for the fucking IDF because the victims of Israeli occupation did what they could to defend themselves? We're supposed to call the Palestinians "terrorists," simply because they are doing what they can to protect their children?
IDF forces operating in the Rafah area near the Gaza-Egypt border located the donkey suspiciously approaching their position and were forced to open fire at it, causing the explosives to detonate.
No injuries were sustained to the soldiers.
(By the way: The American military has used bomb-laden dolphins in warfare.)
I want to make a prediction.
I prophesy that this explosive ass will receive more coverage in the American news media than has the IDF's destruction of the El-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital.
Most Americans don't know, will never know, that bloodthirsty, racist Israelis destroyed a hospital -- for no reason other than the sheer joy of seeing Palestinians die.
The Israeli army targeted and destroyed the Gaza strip’s only rehabilitation hospital even though Israeli authorities said they did not believe weapons were inside of the facility. El-Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital, which treats long-term injuries and physical disabilities, was heavily shelled Thursday evening causing an emergency evacuation of all staff and patients.The recent coverage of Gaza has been absolutely indefensible. Perhaps the most obscene article I have seen is this article by Jeffrey Goldberg. I can bear to give you only a small portion of a thoroughly hideous piece of hate-speech. Get ready to vomit:
The goal of Hamas—the actual, overarching goal—is to terrorize the Jews of Israel, through mass murder, into abandoning their country. If generations of Palestinians have to be sacrificed to that goal, well, Hamas believes such sacrifices are theologically justified."Mirror imaging" may be a term of art used in the intelligence community, but it should also see usage in the field of psychology. (I suppose "projection" is a cognate idea.)
It is painfully obvious -- and has been for decades -- that the reverse is true: The Jews of Israel hope to make life unbearable for the Palestinians, forcing them to leave. The Jewish American writer Michelle Cohen Corasanti has summed up the situation very well...
In November, 1947 we began to execute our Plan Dalet to ethnically cleanse Palestine of the non-Jewish majority. We took, by force of arms, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa, creating hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the process. Having seen the devastation and injustice caused by Plan Dalet, five Arab countries decided on military intervention, but the 60,000 poorly armed and trained Arab soldiers were no match for the 90,000 heavily armed and well trained Zionist soldiers. When we won the war and took even more Palestinian land than the UN gave us, we told the world that David beat Goliath and the west was happy to believe it.This report makes the same point:
But we need to be honest. The Palestinians have paid the price for the Holocaust. We ethnically cleansed as many as we could, which is well-documented by Israeli historians, including from the left Ilan Pappe to the right Benny Morris. We kicked them out and refused to let them back in. We looted their houses, we took the beautiful ones for ourselves and then we razed 500 of their villages so they wouldn’t have a place to come home to. We were once made refugees in Europe and now we have immigrated to Palestine and made the Palestinians refugees. When we wouldn’t let them return, they resorted to violence, so we called them terrorists and made it stick.
Only awareness can set us free, because awareness leads to understanding, and understanding leads to change. We cannot turn a blind eye to the truth.
“In the Occupied Palestinian Territories, cruel methods are employed to ‘exhaust’ the communities, exploit and subjugate them, make life so unbearable that Palestinians will leave or communities be destroyed, including evidence of ethnic cleansing methods, and evidence of intention to destroy the population at least in part (i.e. genocide).”Writers like Jeffrey Goldberg are pure evil. They are beyond rationality, beyond human discourse.
“(Israel practices) strangulation of the Palestinian economy with forced dependency upon the colonial Israeli State and Israeli economy (with no independent Palestinian economy), border controls of imports and exports, exploitation of natural resources, de-development of Palestinian industries and businesses, violation of the full range of employment/workforce rights - including through closures.”
“(There are) Israeli policies and methods designed to impoverish the Palestinians (more than 1 million under poverty line) and strangulate their economy; through movement restrictions denying or hindering access to humanitarian aid and assistance, food and water, medical supplies and aid, hospitals, work and education. Concerns as to starvation in some areas; illegal control and exploitation of Palestinian natural resources (including water) and tourism. Women and children have been particularly affected by lack of access to humanitarian aid, including prevention of access to pre natal, and post natal care; and access to immunisation/health services for children.”
“(Israel conducts) military attacks on civilians, including those amounting to grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention (namely war crimes) and systematic gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law. Evidence of systematic ethnic cleansing methods and the intention to destroy at least in part the population (i.e. genocide). Heavy weaponry normally used in full combat warfare is being used against a Palestinian civilian population in situations where there is no military or security need (including civilians in homes, schools, workplaces, hospitals, field clinics, ambulances).
And yet Goldberg -- not the humane Michelle Cohen Corasanti -- is published in The Atlantic.
For far too many years, our "journalists" have been lying about Israel's despicable war crimes against a completely innocent population whose land was stolen from them. These propagandists have turned Americans against their own interests, and against the interest of humanity. These so-called "reporters" should face a Nuremburg-style tribunal -- and then they should meet with the same much-deserved fate that befell their spiritual forebears, Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels.
16 comments:
This bunk about the "poor" Palestinians I read about everywhere has got to stop. I support Israel and with good reason: they are not bloodthirsty savages using civilians as shields firing rockets into public places with the one goal of killing innocents, theirs and the enemies. Hamas started this, turned down a peace plan because they wanted something for starting this, and now are paying a heavy price for their stupidity. You do realize that the Israelis are living in bomb shelters 24/7 due to he constant rocket fire? Do you actually know any Israelis, like I do, or are you just repeating what our worthless media tells us? Hamas WANTS civilian casualties for sympathy which sites like this offer. Muslim extremists are not our friends and neither is Hamas which needs to be wiped from this face of this Earth and as long as the public supports them, which a lot of people do, this will never end. Peace is possible but only if they stop with the claims of the right to return and the destruction of Israel. I feel bad for the people of Gaza but not so much that I condone attacks upon civilians and then defend their right to terrorism. No one seems to remember that the Israelis give a lot of money to Gaza for aid, more than Hamas, and have had several peace plans that have been rebuffed because the Palestinians refuse any sort of compromise, ala the GOP with Obama who gets the same flack. You can't negotiate with people who want you dead. Yasser Arafat in 1999 got a deal that gave him 90% of what he wanted and he still spit on it. And yet Israel is to blame for defending themselves. If rockets were being fired from Mexico, I doubt we would be as sympathetic to Mexicans as Israel has been to Gaza.
Goldberg - "When you repeatedly fire rockets at civilian targets in a neighboring country, that country usually responds militarily."
Goldberg quoting Obama - "There is no country on Earth that can be expected to live under a daily barrage of rockets."
This talking point is carefully crafted. There is inherent common sense in its formula which generates agreement. But, of course, the formula never applies to the Palestinians. Their civilians are targeted, but they are never allowed to respond, and if they do it is painted as something monstrous, not as an inherent right.
The element of doublethink incorporated into the talking point is enabled by the word "rockets". When the Goldberg statement is rephrased with "attack" replacing "fire rockets at" - ""When you repeatedly attack civilian targets in a neighboring country, that country usually responds militarily." - the one-sidedness of the talking point dissolves.
Agreed. On all points. And speaking of media - you know something is extremely wrong when coverage and overt bias is mirrored at both CNN and FOX. Amazing, isn't it?
Also, more amazing is that a lot of them know what they are doing, that it's wrong, but don't the guts or morality to do anything about it. Another prediction: Israel will, without question, be THE cause of humanity's first nuclear conflagration. It's inevitable. Everyone knows it. The trigger has been itching ever since they stole the damn things.
I find it odd when liberals support a fascist dictatorship over a liberal democracy.
Me too, small j.
being part native american on both sides, the extermination of the Palestinians sounds suspiciously like the invasion & conquest of Turtle Island - a holocaust that killed 18 million people & forced assimilation on the survivors... uh, that's three times the holocaust of WWII...
In a liberal democracy, everybody gets to vote. In Israel, everybody gets to vote. In fascist dictatorship, nobody gets to vote. In Gaza, nobody gets to vote (they had one election, in 2006, and apparently will not have another). In a liberal democracy, everybody has a right to speak at the public square. In Israel, Gideon Levy has a column in Haaretz. In a fascist dictatorship, opposition voices are silenced. In Gaza, there are no dissidents. In a liberal democracy, wealth is spread among the entire population. In Israel, wealth is not concentrated in a few hands. In a fascist dictatorship, only the ruling class has privileges. In Gaza, the elite are comfortably ensconced in hotels while the rest are left out in the cold.
When the west gave the Jews Palestine it wasn't an empty piece of land. It was a country with its citizens. It had schools,roads,business,buildings,hospitals etc. People who lived were kicked out of their homes in the middle of the night and later slaughtered. To put the victim and the criminal at the level is just obscene. Not giving up their rights is heroic in my opinion
I find it odd that a so called liberal like Bill Maher defends the right of Israel to commit crimes against humanity in his last show.
When will you stop lying to yourself, small j? The real power in the Occupied territories is of course, the occupying force, for whom none of the occupied peoples have voted. Arguments about what technically constitutes occupation are casuistry.
America was technically a democracy -- the finest democracy in the world -- when we were murdering Indians by the millions, and enslaving blacks by the millions. Calling yourself a democracy does not justify ghastly behavior, and you damned well know it.
There is no liberal democratic government in the middle east, (small j) joseph. Not sure where you got that idea from, but it couldn't be from Israel. No democracy can be based on race or religion (or both). When Israel stops collective punishment (a war crime established at Nuremberg, no less), then perhaps I will be sympathetic to their situation (as I certainly don't condone terrorism in any form).
Question for you: Sometime in the past year, I read an account (not sure where) that claimed Israel's right-wing party had engineered political evens in Gaza to ensure that the radical Hamas came to power instead of more moderate factions. I don't claim that this is what really happened, but I would like to read more about the theory and assess it on my own. Is this a familiar argument? Can you suggest reporting or scholarship that falls either way on the topic? Thanks in advance.
"I find it odd that a so called liberal like Bill Maher supports the right of Israel to commit crimes against humanity in his last show." The issue isn't politics, but race, Anonymous. Bill Maher is a member of the Master Race, and so he supports Israel even if they were roasting Palestinian children on spits or casting them into the open flames of Moloch. Race trumps politics every time. As a member of the (Self) Chosen People, Maher has to provide apologies for his tribe even if they are drinking the blood of children in one of their periodic pogroms paid for by the US taxpayer. Firing shells into hospitals, machine-gunning children, bombing schools, and murdering civilians for fun are just expressions of Israeli culture, and if you don't understand that, then you are an anti-Semite and a racist who doesn't deserve to be allowed to state your opinions.
cracker, your own reaction is itself racist. Maher is Catholic. His mother was born a Jew, but this fact was not known to him until later in life.
The racism of Israel is no different than the racism of white America during the slaughter of the Indians.
Smallj,
Haven't you got anything better than "Israel has the right to defend itself" against an occupation army with rockets that 99% of the time cause no casualties?
Or, "Hamas did not honor a cease fire" that was brokered by Egypt and Israel and Mahmood Abbass in their absence?
Or are you of the opinion that one Israeli dead equals 1000 dead and wounded Palestinians?
Or Is it that Muhammad the warrior, and Jesus the peace maker just don't get Moses the "coward" who told God, my poeple are just evil period.
"Or Is it that Muhammad the warrior, and Jesus the peace maker just don't get Moses the "coward" who told God, my poeple are just evil period." What the hell is that supposed to mean?
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