Do we live on the same planet? by William Bowles

By William Bowles
featured writer
Dandelion Salad
Creative-i
2 January 2009

Apparently not, well not if you listen/watch the BBC or read the corporate press, not that creating a world that doesn’t actually exist is anything new, it’s just that the actions of Fascist Israel has stretched our credulity to its limits, thus the media have been forced to stretch their lies to the limit.

You have to ask yourselves how the hell do they get away with it?

The answer is simple: it’s racism, pure and simple. Palestinians are less than human, thus eliminating them is as easy as eliminating vermin, and the actions of Fascist Israel are backed up with their words; Palestinians are “vermin”, “cockroaches”, “Palestine is finished” and so it goes.

If anybody harboured any illusions about the settler state of Israel, surely now those illusions must shattered as surely as the shattered bodies of Palestinian children are.

The question is, what can we do about it when we have a complicit government and a complicit media ganging up on our consciousness?

The BBC for example, ably assisted the Israeli Fascists when it gave Tzipi Livni, Israel’s foreign minister airtime (courtesy the British taxpayer) by broadcasting an interview on 1 January, 2009 in which she said (several times) there is “no humanitarian crisis” in the Gaza Strip. No alternative view was presented to the listener.

At the bottom of the propaganda blitz there sits one simple lie: Hamas rockets, and who broke the cease-fire, and surely, without those ‘Grads’ they would have had to be invented. Now you can argue that Hamas is playing right into the hands of the Israeli Fascists by being David to Israel’s Fascist Goliath by shooting off its feeble rockets but I ask you, in the same situation what would you do? In any case, it would have made no difference, any more than it has over the past sixty years?

“On November 12 the paper’s Jerusalem reporter, Isabel Kershner, wrote: “At least six Palestinian militants were killed in a clash and an Israeli airstrike on Nov. 4 after an Israeli force entered Gaza for the first time in five months”” — Source: The New York Times, 13 Nov, 2008

And,

“Israel Defense Forces troops yesterday killed a Hamas gunman and wounded two others in the first armed clash in the Gaza Strip since a cease-fire was declared there in June. […] An Israeli army spokeswoman said troops had entered the territory.” Ha’aretz, 5 November, 2008

(For more on the who broke the cease-fire, See ‘NY times: Who Ended the 6 Month Cease-fire in Israel/Palestine?’

The creation of the ‘victim state’

Victims? Israelis in the port city of Ashdod evacuated a building hit by a rocket from Gaza on Thursday. Photo: Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

Even the photo the NYT chose to use of (an uninjured) Israeli girl reinforces the illusion. But in reality it is the actions of the Israeli state itself that has put the lives of its own citizens in peril, making them literally cannon fodder.

Unique in history, the creation of the Israeli ‘state’ by the Western powers in 1948, was merely the continuation of US/British colonial policy in the Middle East only now using the ‘victim’ as the wedge (and willing pawn) with which to divide the Arab anti-colonial movement, a ploy that in part, played on the alleged guilt of the Europeans following WWII.

“How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.” — ‘Why Bombing Ashkelon is The Most Tragic Irony’ by Robert Fisk, the Independent, 30 December, 2008

Lest we forget Israel was settled by Europeans whose connection to the Middle East was tenuous at best and based on the ideology of Zionism, also a European (white) imperial creation supported by British imperialism with its eye on the prize — oil and a passage to India.

Thus the (white) Jews of Europe became the willing victims of imperial design, a classic case of fleas on a fleas back, only too willing to beat up on the Arabs in the name of being the victim because along with their European brethren, they were, and are at heart, white with all that it means.

The destruction of Gaza therefore is the only logical conclusion of the actions of a racist, fundamentalist, fanatical and clearly Fascist state, the so-called ‘chosen people’. After all, where else could it go? Do a deal with the Palestinians? Two-state, one-state, any Palestinian state? Forget it! In the words of the Israelis themselves the destruction of Gaza was planned months ago, long before Hamas allegedly broke the cease-fire.

And with the West’s state/corporate media pushing the Israelis line of being the ‘victim’ of the ‘cockroaches’, success was assured, the Israelis could slaughter with impunity. Goebbels would be proud of them, this was the biggest lie of them all!

Israel, armed to the teeth (the fourth largest army on the planet) by its master (whatever those who say that it’s the tail wagging the dog) the US, without whose blessing the Israeli state does nothing.

The lies are necessary because our rulers fear us much more than they fear the Palestinians.

see

Agent of a foreign power? by William Bowles

Israeli warplanes attacked the Hamas run television station in Gaza city

Keep Your Eye on the Ball; This Is Not about Rockets by Stuart Littlewood

Hamas vows retaliation for top leader + Israel kills senior Hamas figure in air attack

Letter to Bush on Gaza Crisis by Ralph Nader

We Lived to Tell the Story: Lebanon Rescued Us by Cynthia McKinney

Rampage in Gaza for a Bump in the Polls By Mike Whitney

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