I shall spare you the latest list of Palestinian dead, their names and the funerals planned for them in the next few days – if you are moved you can see them on Al Jazeera, the only major news portal who are reporting how soldiers of the Israeli state have just shot and killed 17 unarmed protesters in Gaza.
The picture below shows how the simple truth of this outrage should be reported on:
Because this is what happened.
But the corporate media, supine and manipulative in support of the apartheid regime of Israel, is doing all it can to massage these murders into something more suitable for public consumption. The good lads at Media Lens corrected the BBC’s headline for them this morning:
Spot the difference? As far as the BBC is concerned these people were not shot by Israeli soldiers with guns – they died in ‘clashes’ which is the cowardly euphemism for the terrorism of the Israeli state that all of the corporate media uses.
How will the ‘fearless journalism’ of The Guardian portray it? Well they smudged it as much as they possibly could.
Of course the word ‘clashes’ is deployed and The Guardian is quick to hide behind the U.N. to imply that ‘restraint’ is needed on both sides. As not a single Israeli solider picked up so much as a grazed knee while killing unarmed civilians – a rational observer might reflect that rather more restraint is required from the people shooting the guns than those receiving the bullets. The reality of the deaths is also implicitly questioned under the sideline of ‘border protest’ – not ‘border shooting’ or ‘border massacre’ or ‘border outrage’.
The Independent? Nicely on message:
At least the involvement of Israeli troops gets mentioned in the headline – but the dead were still killed in ‘clashes’.
This is how the corporate media works. They circle the wagons in a ring and deploy the same euphemisms, selected facts, slanted ‘coverage’ and pompous editorial to convince you that a lie is the truth.
17 people did not die in clashes on the Gaza border – they were shot dead by armed troops. If I go on a protest about this today and a sniper shoots me dead with a rifle, I will not have been involved in a clash, I will have been murdered while protesting.
This is the reality of the apartheid state of Israel. This is the very flower of their fascist treatment of Palestinians – a continuation of what they have been doing throughout their brutal and illegal occupation of Palestinian land.
Be in no doubt that the hoopla manufactured by Israeli support groups (and gleefully amplified by corporate media) about Anti-semitism in the Labour movement has one goal: to silence anybody who might speak out against the crimes of the Israeli state. We are all supposed to be so frightened of being labelled an anti-semite and a racist that we will buy into how The BBC and The Guardian carefully airbrushes Israeli murders to make them appear a proportionate response to Palestinian aggression.
I hope that the people who were protesting outside Westminster about anti-semitism will return today to condemn the racist murder of 17 unarmed civilians and that when they do the BBC et al will give those protests the same lurid coverage as they did to the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies Of British Jews. The Haze isn’t holding its breath on either count.
You might be interested to know how the Board of Deputies Of British Jews is spinning these murders this morning. The dead were all apparently tools of Hamas:
And these are the people we are supposed to listen to about the alleged racism of Jeremy Corbyn – a life long campaigner against racism in all of its forms.
Please share widely and push back against the corporate media and the Israeli lobby.
What can one say? There are some things which are simply beyond humanity. Israel basically treats Palestinians as Untermensch – disposable human garbage, which must be the greatest historical ironies given European Jewry’s history. Here’s some choice epithets.
Menachem Begin once said that ‘Palestinians are beasts walking on two legs’ whilst former IDF chief of staff, Rafael Eitan referred to them as ‘drugged roaches in a bottle’ – and also added that ‘a good arab is a dead arab’. Not to be outdone another former chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon referred to the Palestinian ”threat” as a cancer on which he was performing chemotherapy.’ Quoted in ‘The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, two distinguished US historians.
But Israel is apparently above criticism, with its licence to massacre, it enjoys the full support of the West, particularly the United States, through influential lobby groups like AIPAC (American Israeli Public Affairs Committee).
Of course there will be the customary denunciations of ”anti-semitism” which are no doubt intended to distract from such disgusting zionist practices. But Israel is rapidly using up its moral capital, and more and more people are beginning to recognise this.