ZGram - 8/29/2001 - "The Other War"

[Ingrid Rimland]

 Copyright (c) 2001 - Ingrid A. Rimland

 ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

 August 29, 2001

 Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

 This article appeared yesterday in the Jordan Times.  It was written by
Zaid Nabulsi and is titled "The Other War".  Pass it on to your
Christian-Zionist friends and supporters for their elucidation:

 [START]

THERE IS little one can write about the daily massacres of the abandoned
and helpless  Palestinians that the readers have not already seen on their
TV screens. Rather than trying to  imagine it through words, the harrowing
ferocity of the ongoing butchery is best visualised by  actual images,
delivered daily for all to witness in laser sharp satellite footage.

  Hence, I want to talk about another unseen weapon in this uneven war. It
is the deliberate  manipulation of words and language in the Western media
to distort the facts in order to  exonerate Israel. While this apparatus of
war is not as easily detectable as bombs and bullets, it is  equally evil
and demented.

  For example, early in the current Intifada, Newsweek carried a report in
its Nov. 13 issue last year,  titled "Beyond Slingshots and Rubber Bullets"
which had a chart comparing the actual military  capabilities of Israel and
the Palestinians. While listing some of the arsenal Israel possessed and
unleashed against the Palestinians (warplanes, tanks, etc.), the column for
the Palestinian  "arsenal" simply stated that "the Oslo accords allowed
30,000 weapons but the Palestinian  National Authority has an estimated
40,000 - 45,000".

  "Weapons"? Indeed, Edward Said's thesis that American Zionists are far
more obsessive than  their Israeli counterparts could not have more glaring
truth to it. Not even that professional  fabricator and outright liar, Dori
Gold, could have used such a generic term in the context of  comparing and
quantifying the military strength of the two sides. The next thing I
expected to  read was that Israel "confiscated fifty land", or that it "cut
off a hundred water". Not too far  fetched from the same debased
propagandists.

  The game of words keeps getting uglier. Recently, when deputy Israeli
Police Minister Gideon  Esra, on the pages of Yediot Aharonot, called for
Palestinian suicide bombers to be buried with  pig skin or pig blood, CNN
did not even pretend to conceal any outrage and simply volunteered to
convey the bizarre fabrication that "according to Muslim belief, being
buried in pig skin or blood  could make the body ineligible for martyr
status", and therefore such practice, CNN narrated,  "could deter potential
attackers". So, we learn, there is a useful deterrence after all from the
prehistoric and barbaric ritual of mutilating dead bodies.

  The above is only a small example of the journalistic debauchery
littering the American media in  particular and the Western media in
general when reporting the Israeli massacres of Palestinians.  Of course,
it is impossible to catalogue all the lies - many activists have been
tirelessly  monitoring and exposing the travesty - but it would be accurate
to say that for each Israeli bullet  or missile fired during this Intifada,
there was a written or spoken twin attack in the media.

  The same kind of people who could not care to explain whether "weapons"
referred to meagre  pistols and rifles (currently in the hands of the
Palestinians) or to nuclear warheads, are still  waging a parallel war
against the Palestinians by murdering the truth or deforming it beyond
recognition.

  These are the same organisations that have been reporting the televised
Israeli practice-shooting of  Palestinian schoolchildren simply as "violent
incidents". These are the same news outlets  describing Israeli targeted
bombings of civilian homes by stating that "some buildings were  damaged
during the clashes". When a Palestinian family is wiped out in their home
by tank fire,  there are always "conflicting reports" about how they were
killed. When passengers are blown  up in their car by a helicopter gunship,
they are instantly described as "potential terrorists on their  way to
plant a bomb". When Palestinian infants are torn by Israeli bullets and
shells, "crossfire"  is most likely to have caused their deaths.

  But when the victims are Israeli, there is none of that. You suddenly
start learning the names of the  victims, that they had a loving mother and
a father, that they had a bright future ahead of them, that  they even had
a beautiful smile, extinguished by cruel, barbaric creatures. None of this
of course  applies to our children who, the Zionists claim, get sent by
their parents to die as a media ploy.

  In the frenzy of this dual-frontier war, we must pause to address the
real causes of this immoral,  almost criminal, falsification of facts by
people who otherwise seem to be normal, law-abiding  citizens and
professionals.

  We have to face the fact that underlying this media war, as with the
roots of the original Israeli  military aggression, there lurks a very
potent disease; a severe sickness of the mind that needs  specialists to
cure, if it can ever be cured. This disease is the subject of the major UN
conference  next month in Durban, South Africa. This affliction is racism.

  The most pernicious manifestation of this venom is the blatant racism
imbedded deep within the  Zionist psyche, the racism that arrogantly
refuses to admit or relate to the catastrophe that befell  the Palestinian
people when the colonial Zionists arrived and forcibly stole - yes stole -
their  land in 1948, the land they inhabited for thousands of years. This
is the same poisoned ideology  upon which entire generations of Israelis
were brought up, totally oblivious to the five million  human beings who
have been paying the heavy price of their obnoxious Zionist dream for the
last  53 years.

  This racism - the basic belief that Jewish life is more valuable than
Arab life coupled with the  zealous insistence that fulfilling an
incongruous biblical prophecy is a justification for ethnic  cleansing and
war crimes - is the only explanation of how the murders of hundreds of
Palestinians in the Intifada can be turned into mere statistics, while the
taking of an Israeli life  prompts immediate reflection, anguish and
endless grieving and questioning of the humanity of  the other side. It is
all about racism.

  What else can explain the intellectual fervour driving an incessant
disinformationist like Lee  Hockstader to devote a full report in the
Washington Post (Aug. 19) to quote an interview with a  father of a victim
of the Jerusalem pizzeria bombing? Of course all civilian deaths are tragic
and  deplorable, but would this reporter ever consider publishing one word
from an agonising  Palestinian mother whose child was ripped apart, not by
a lone bomber, but by direct Israeli  military orders? Would he ever
contemplate doing that, just for the sake of perceived, if not real,
impartiality?

  Of course not, and you can understand why from the excerpts he chose from
this interview. The  words of the grieving Israeli father that were music
to Hockstader's ears were the assertion that the  "profound hatred"
Israelis encounter from Palestinians (referred to throughout the interview
only  as "barbarians") was "baseless ... imponderable hatred", a kind of
hatred that "doesn't really  have any basis to it."

  This is the message that these deranged Zionists in the Western media
want to disseminate to the  rest of the world. That there is no occupation,
there is no dehumanisation, there is no collective  punishment, there are
no arbitrary home demolitions, illegal detentions, humiliating road blocks,
land confiscation, uprooting of trees, torture inside awful prison camps,
sanctioned assassinations,  blockades of food and urgent medical
assistance, and indiscriminate bombings of civilian homes.  None of these
crimes exist. What drives the Palestinians to kill themselves, we are told,
is pure  inexplicable anti-Semitic hatred that has no basis or background.

  Basically, people like Hockstader, who know too well that their ideology
is built upon a racist  premise, are in constant need for a justification
for this racism - the justification being that  Palestinians are an
irrational murderous species - so that they can continue to keep a facade
of  humanism while looking upon the Palestinian people as a group of
untamed beasts that need to be  put down by force.

  And brutal force is what they are advocating. A despicable character in
the name of Michael Kelly  called upon Israel in the Washington Post (Aug.
15) to "unleash an overwhelming force" against  the Palestinians, to "go
right ahead and escalate the violence" and to "destroy, kill, capture and
expel the armed Palestinian forces."

  Two equally astonishing pleas for Palestinian blood to be spilled were
voiced by Charles  Krauthammer (Aug. 16) and George Will (Aug. 17 in the
same newspaper.

  If anyone dared incite the Apartheid regime to do the same against the
ANC in South Africa some  years ago, this person would immediately have
been castigated as a mad racist, if not arrested and  charged. But the
Palestinians have already been dehumanised and demoted down to a breed of
unreasonable, homicidal, violent beings by the Zionist instigators, and
that is why such bigotry  goes unchecked.

  On this note, the delegates meeting in South Africa next month should put
up a fight and recall the  well known fact that when the Apartheid regime
was squeezed and isolated by the entire world,  Israel was its only
lifeline and ever faithful ally. Maybe it would be an occasion for the
world to  remember that the state of alleged Holocaust survivors was the
only country having a full scale  political, economic, military and
scientific cooperation with that abhorrent neo-Nazi regime  throughout its
long reign, and was the country directly responsible for prolonging the
life of  Apartheid being its only breathing outlet (the long-term arms
supply contracts between Israel and  the Apartheid regime were even the
subject of a UN resolution in 1987 calling upon Israel to  desist from its
scandalous partnership with this racist regime).

  Perhaps, if the issue of Zionist racism is explored in an objective and
scientific manner - and it  cannot be more timely than during the upcoming
Durban conference - then maybe the present  shameless onslaught by the
anti-Palestinian media can be exposed and confined to its  narrow-minded
perspective; that of raving xenophobia, rampant bigotry and disguised
Jewish  supremacy.

[END}

  The writer is a Jordanian attorney working in Geneva.

=====

Thought for the Day:  (A thoughtful gem from Israel Shamir)

"Dear American Friends, in the American press there were hysterical reports
of the dangerous life of Jews in Palestine. What do you think of a sideline
campaign "Bring the Jews (from Israel) to the real Promised Land of the
US"?  So many good slogans: "Let My People Come to the US", "Green Card to
Every Jew". Actually, not bad an idea, the Russians would move to the US
before you would say Jack Robinson, and the remaining Oriental Jews would
blend into
Arab Middle East. The rich Ashkenazi Israelis anyway have American
passports and live mainly in LA.  As a bonus, we can call every objector to
this scheme, 'an anti-Semite'".