A-Infos (en) <caravan99> Telling the Truth About Israel...

[ryan fortune <mangoryan@yahoo.co.uk>]

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TELLING THE TRUTH ABOUT ISRAEL...
by Robert Fisk 
[Independent Digital (UK) Ltd, 2001]
 
When journalists refuse to tell the truth about Israel
for fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" it 
means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle
East.
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South
Africa against the majority black population? What if
we had lauded the South African white leadership as
"hard-line warriors" rather than racists? What if we
had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at
Sharpeville as an understandable "security crackdown"
by the South African police. 
And described black children shot by the police as an
act of "child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we
had called upon the "terrorist" ANC leadership to
"control their own people". Almost every day that is
exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian
war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the
Israelis, no matter how many murders - by either side
- and no matter how bloody the reputation of the
Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible
conflict as if we supported the South African whites
against the blacks.  
No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily
supported the apartheid regime) and no, the
Palestinians are not the blacks of the ' shanty towns.
But there's not much difference between Gaza and the
black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much
difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in
the occupied territories and that of the South African
police. The apartheid regime had death squads, just as
Israel has today.Yet even they did not use helicopter
gunships and missiles. Rarely since the Second World
War has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians.
And rarely has a people been so frequently excused and
placated as the Israelis. Israeli embassies are now
buttonholing editors around the world, saying that
it's not fair to call Israel's Prime Minister
"hard-line". And the reporters are falling into line.
Sharon, we are told, may turn into a pragmatist,
another De Gaulle; in truth he's more like the French
putschist generals in Algeria. They also used torture
and massacred their Arab opponents. It needed an
Israeli writer- Nehemia Strasler, in Ha'aretz - to
point out that Sharon's career spells anything but
peace. He voted against the peace treaty with Egypt
in1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern
Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in
the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the
Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He
abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in 1994. He
voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He
condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon
in 2000. He is now building Jewish settlements on
occupied Arab land - in total violation of
international law at a faster rate than his
predecessor. Yet we are to believe that it is the
corrupt, Parkinson's-haunted Yasser Arafat who is to
blame for the war. He will not "control" his people.
He is chastised by George Bush while his people are
bestialised by the Israeli leadership. 

Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, used
to talk of the Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass
jar". Menachem Begin called them "two-legged beasts".
Rabbi Ovdia Yousef, the spiritual head of the Shas
party, called them "serpents". In August last year,
Ehud Barak called them "crocodiles". Last month, the
Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat
a "scorpion". Even the South African regime never
called the blacks by such vile names. And woe betide
the diplomat or journalist who points this out.
Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in
Paris, accused the Swedish president of the European
Union of "encouraging anti-Jewish violence". To
condemn Israel for "eliminating terrorists", the
centre wrote in a letter to the Swedish prime
minister, "recalls the allied argument during the
Second World War, according to which bombing the
railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage
anti-Semitism among the Germans". Sweden was making "a
unilateral attack against the state of the survivors
of the Holocaust". And the Swedish president's crime?
She had dared to say that "the practice of
eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and
could provoke new violence". She did not even refer to
death squads. <br> In February Newsweek propagated a
virtual fraud on its cover by showing- under the
headline "Terror Goes Global - Exclusive: Bin Laden's
International Network" - a frightening photograph of a
man (head and shoulders), his face covered in an Arab
scarf, holding a rifle in his right hand. The reader
would imagine this to be a member of Osama bin Laden's
network of "global terror". But I traced the Finnish
photographer who took this picture. He snapped it at a
funeral on the West Bank. The man was an armed member
of the Palestinian Tanzim militia -- and had nothing
to do with Bin Laden. The Tanzim are violent enough.
But the cover generically smeared the entire
Palestinian people by associating them with the man
supposedly responsible for bombing US embassies in
Africa. 
As that brave American writer Charley Reese said in
his regular US column, the Israelis "have created
their own unconquerable enemy". 
They have made the Palestinians so crushed, so
desperate, so humiliated that they have nothing to
lose. We, too, have done this. Our gutlessness, our
refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered
as "anti-Semites" - the most loathsome of libels
against any journalist - means that we are aiding and
abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East. 
Maybe we should look up those cuttings of the
apartheid era and remember when men were not without
honour...
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DO YOU REALLY CARE? 

If so, please go to the website below and sign the
petition for an international protection force for the
Palestinian people. So far, about 80-000 signatures
have bee collected. If we cannot get a million
signatures, then that will surely reflect our true
stance with regards to a just cause.
I hope that you will take a minute to sign, send, and
then pass the following address to those who believe
in stopping injustice. 

<http://www.petitiononline.com/palpet/petition.html>


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