[News] Gaza and the Threat of World War

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Weekend Edition September 12-14, 201
*http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war/*


<http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war/#><http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/12/gaza-and-the-threat-of-world-war/#> 

*Breaking the Last Taboo*


  Gaza and the Threat of World War

by JOHN PILGER

"There is a taboo," said the visionary Edward Said, "on telling the 
truth about Palestine and the great destructive force behind Israel. 
  Only when this truth is out can any of us be free."

For many people, the truth is out now.  At last, they know.  Those once 
intimidated into silence can't look away now. Staring at them from their 
TV, laptop, phone, is proof of the barbarism of the Israeli state and 
the great destructive force of its mentor and provider, the United 
States, the cowardice of European governments, and the collusion of 
others, such as Canada and Australia, in this epic crime.

The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege of Gaza is a 
siege of all of us. The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symptom 
of much of humanity under siege and a warning that the threat of a new 
world war is growing by the day.

When Nelson Mandela called the struggle of Palestine "the greatest moral 
issue of our time", he spoke on behalf of true civilisation, not that 
which empires invent.  In Latin America, the governments of Brazil, 
Chile, Venezuela, Bolivia, El Salvador, Peru and Ecuador have made their 
stand on Gaza. Each of these countries has known its own dark silence 
when immunity for mass murder was sponsored by the same godfather in 
Washington that answered the cries of children in Gaza with more 
ammunition to kill them.

Unlike Netanyahu and his killers, Washington's pet fascists in Latin 
America didn't concern themselves with moral window dressing. They 
simply murdered, and left the bodies on rubbish dumps.  For Zionism, the 
goal is the same: to dispossess and ultimately destroy an entire human 
society: a truth that 225 Holocaust survivors and their descendants have 
compared with the genesis of genocide.

Nothing has changed since the Zionists' infamous "Plan D" in 1948 that 
ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the website of the 
/Times of Israel/ were the words: "Genocide is Permissible". A deputy 
speaker of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, Moshe Feiglin, demands a 
policy of mass expulsion into concentration camps. An MP, Ayelet Shaked, 
whose party is a member of the governing coalition, calls for the 
extermination of Palestinian mothers to prevent them giving birth to 
what she calls "little snakes".

For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian 
children by abusing them through loud-speakers. Then they shoot them 
dead.  For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to 
give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and 
the baby has died, and sometimes the mother.

For years, reporters have known about Palestinian doctors and ambulance 
crews given permission by Israeli commanders to attend the wounded or 
remove the dead, only to be shot through the head.

For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from 
getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they've tried to reach 
a clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking 
stick was murdered in this way -- a bullet in her back.

When I put the facts of this crime to Dori Gold, a senior adviser to the 
Israeli prime minister, he said, "Unfortunately in every kind of warfare 
there are cases of civilians who are accidentally killed. But the case 
you cite was not terrorism. Terrorism means putting the cross-hairs of 
the sniper's rifle on a civilian deliberately."

I replied, "That's exactly what happened."

"No," he said, "it did /not/ happen."

Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel's apologists. As 
the former /New York Times/ reporter Chris Hedges points out, the 
reporting of such an atrocity invariably ends up as "caught in the 
cross-fire". For as long as I have covered the Middle East, much if not 
most of the western media has colluded in this way.

In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies helpless 
while soldiers from the "most moral army in the world" blew both his 
legs off.  This atrocity was given two lines on the BBC website. 
Thirteen journalists were killed by Israel in its latest bloodfest in 
Gaza. All were Palestinian. Who knows their names?

Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across the world; 
and the  voices of /sensible/ liberalism are worried. Their hand 
wringing and specious choir of "equal blame" and "Israel's right to 
defend itself" will not wash any more; neither will the smear of 
anti-Semitism. Neither will their selective cry that "something must be 
done" about Islamic fanatics but nothing must be done about Zionist 
fanatics.

One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being 
celebrated as a sage by the /Guardian/ while the children of Gaza were 
blown to bits. This is the same Ian McEwan who ignored the pleading of 
Palestinians not to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. "If I 
only went to countries that I approve of, I probably would never get out 
of bed," said McEwan.

If they could speak, the dead of Gaza might say: Stay in bed, great 
novelist, for your very presence smoothes the bed of racism, apartheid, 
ethnic cleansing and murder -- no matter the weasel words you uttered as 
you claimed your prize.

Understanding the sophistry and power of liberal propaganda is key to 
understanding why Israel's outrages endure; why the world looks on; why 
sanctions are never applied to Israel; and why nothing less than a total 
boycott of everything Israeli is now a measure of basic human decency.

The most incessant propaganda says Hamas is committed to the destruction 
of Israel.  Khaled Hroub, the Cambridge University scholar considered a 
world leading authority on Hamas, says this phrase is "never used or 
adopted by Hamas, even in its most radical statements".  The oft-quoted 
"anti-Jewish" 1988 Charter was the work of "one individual and made 
public without appropriate Hamas consensus .... The author was one of 
the 'old guard' "; the document is regarded as an embarrassment and 
never cited.

Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long 
settled for a two-state solution. When Medea Benjamin, the fearless 
Jewish American activist, was in Gaza, she carried a letter from Hamas 
leaders to President Obama that made clear the government of Gaza wanted 
peace with Israel.  It was ignored. I personally know of many such 
letters carried in good faith, ignored or dismissed.

The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never reported: 
it is the only Arab government to have been freely and democratically 
elected by its people. Worse, it has now formed a government of unity 
with the Palestinian Authority.  A single, resolute Palestinian voice -- 
in the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council and the International 
Criminal Court -- is the most feared threat.

Since 2002, a pioneering media unit at Glasgow University has produced 
remarkable studies of reporting and propaganda in Israel/Palestine. 
Professor Greg Philo and his colleagues were shocked to find a public 
ignorance compounded by TV news reporting. The more people watched, the 
less they knew.

Greg Philo says the problem is not "bias" as such. Reporters and 
producers are as moved as anyone by the suffering of Palestinians; but 
so imposing is the power structure of the media --- as an extension of 
the state and its vested interests --- that critical facts and 
historical context are routinely suppressed.

Incredibly, less than nine per cent of young viewers interviewed by 
  Professor Philo's team were aware that Israel was the occupying power, 
and that the illegal settlers were Jewish; many believed them to be 
Palestinian. The term "Occupied Territories" was seldom explained. Words 
such as "murder", "atrocity", "cold-blooded killing" were used only to 
describe the deaths of Israelis.

Recently, a BBC reporter, David Loyn, was critical of another British 
journalist, Jon Snow of Channel 4 News. Snow was so moved by what he had 
seen in Gaza he went on YouTube to make a humanitarian appeal. What 
concerned the BBC man was that Snow had breached protocol and been 
emotional in his YouTube piece.

"Emotion," wrote Loyn, "is the stuff of propaganda and news is against 
propaganda". Did he write this with a straight face?  In fact, Snow's 
delivery was calm.  His crime was to have strayed outside the boundaries 
of fake impartiality. Unforgivably, he didn't censor himself.

In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of /The 
Times/ in London, wrote the following in his diary: "I spend my nights 
in taking out anything which will hurt [German] susceptibilities and in 
dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them."

On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a masterclass in the Dawson 
Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the programme /Newsnight/, 
Mark Urban, gave five reasons why the Middle East was in turmoil. None 
included the historic or contemporary role of the British government. 
  The Cameron government's dispatch of £8 billion worth of arms and 
military equipment to Israel was airbrushed. Britain's massive arms 
shipment to Saudi Arabia was airbrushed. Britain's role in the 
destruction of Libya was airbrushed. Britain's support for the tyranny 
in Egypt was airbrushed.

As for the British invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they didn't 
happen, either.

The only expert witness on this BBC programme was an academic called 
Toby Dodge from the London School of Economics. What viewers needed to 
know was that Dodge had been a special adviser to David Petraeus, the 
American general largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq and 
Afghanistan. But this, too, was airbrushed.

In matters of war and peace, BBC-style illusions of impartiality and 
credibility do more to limit and control public discussion than tabloid 
distortion. As Greg Philo pointed out, Jon Snow's moving commentary on 
YouTube was limited to whether the Israeli assault on Gaza was 
proportionate or reasonable. What was missing -- and is almost always 
missing -- was the essential truth of the longest military occupation in 
modern times: a criminal enterprise backed by western governments from 
Washington to London to Canberra.

As for the myth that "vulnerable" and "isolated" Israel is surrounded by 
enemies, Israel is actually surrounded by strategic allies. The 
Palestinian Authority, bankrolled, armed and directed by the US, has 
long colluded with Tel Aviv. Standing shoulder to shoulder with 
Netanyahu are the tyrannies in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United 
Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar --- if the World Cup ever gets to Qatar, 
count on Mossad to run the security.

Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble. The resistance in 
Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw 
Ghetto -- which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and 
surprise against an overpowering military machine. The last surviving 
leader of the Warsaw uprising, Marek Edelman, wrote a letter of 
solidarity to the Palestinian resistance, comparing it with the ZOB, his 
ghetto fighters. The letter began: "Commanders of the Palestine 
military, paramilitary and partisan operations -- and to all soldiers 
[of Palestine]."

Dr. Mads Gilbert is a Norwegian doctor renowned for his heroic work in 
Gaza.  On 8 August, Dr. Gilbert returned to his hometown, Tronso in 
Norway which, as he pointed out, the Nazis had occupied for seven years. 
He said, "Imagine being back in 1945 and we in Norway did not win the 
liberation struggle, did not throw out the occupier. Imagine the 
occupier remaining in our country, taking it piece by piece, for decades 
upon decades, and banishing us to the leanest areas, and taking the fish 
in the sea and the water beneath us, then bombing our hospitals, our 
ambulance workers, our schools, our homes.

"Would we have given up and waved the white flag? No, we would not! And 
this is the situation in Gaza. This is not a battle between terrorism 
and democracy. Hamas is not the enemy Israel is fighting. Israel is 
waging a war against the Palestinian people's will to resist. It is the 
Palestinian people's dignity that they will not accept this.

"In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews /Untermenschen/ -- subhuman. Today, 
Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people who can be slaughtered 
without any in power reacting.

"So I have returned to Norway, a free country, and this country is free 
because we had a resistance movement, because occupied nations have the 
right to resist, even with weapons -- it's stated in international law. 
And the Palestinian people's resistance in Gaza is admirable: a struggle 
for us all."

There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what Edward Said 
called "the last taboo".  My documentary, /Palestine Is Still the 
Issue/, was nominated for a Bafta, a British academy award, and praised 
by the Independent Television Commission for its "journalistic 
integrity" and the "care and thoroughness with which it was researched." 
  Yet, within minutes of the film's broadcast on Britain's ITV Network, 
a shock wave struck -- a deluge of emails described me as a "demonic 
psychopath", "a purveyor of hate and evil", "an anti-Semite of the most 
dangerous kind".  Much of this was orchestrated by Zionists in the US 
who could not possibly have seen the film. Death threats arrived at a 
rate of one a day.

Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike Carlton 
last month. In his regular column in the /Sydney Morning Herald/, 
Carlton produced a rare piece of journalism about Israel and the 
Palestinians; he identified the oppressors and their victims. He was 
careful to limit his attack to "a new and brutal Israel dominated by the 
hard-line, right-wing Likud party of Netanyahu". Those who had 
previously run the Zionist state, he implied, belonged to "a proud 
liberal tradition".

On cue, the deluge struck. He was called "a bag of Nazi slime, a 
Jew-hating racist."  He was threatened repeatedly, and he emailed his 
attackers to "get fucked".

The /Herald/ demanded he apologise. When he refused, he was suspended, 
then he resigned.  According to the /Herald's/ publisher, Sean Aylmer, 
the company "expects much higher standards from its columnists."

The "problem" of Carlton's acerbic, often solitary liberal voice in a 
country in which Rupert Murdoch controls 70 per cent of the capital city 
press --- Australia is the world's first murdocracy --- would be solved 
twice over. The Australian Human Rights Commission is to investigate 
complaints against Carlton under the Racial Discrimination Act, which 
outlaws any public act or utterance that is "reasonably likely ... to 
offend, insult, humiliate another person or a group of people" on the 
basic of their race, colour or national or ethnic origin.

In contrast to safe, silent Australia --- where the Carltons are made 
extinct --- real journalism is alive in Gaza.  I often speak on the 
phone with Mohammed Omer, an extraordinary young Palestinian journalist, 
to whom I presented, in 2008, the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.  
Whenever I called him during the assault on Gaza, I could hear the whine 
of drones, the explosion of missiles. He interrupted one call to attend 
to children huddled outside waiting for transport amidst the explosions. 
When I spoke to him on 30 July, a single Israeli F-19 fighter had just 
slaughtered 19 children. On 20 August, he described how Israeli drones 
had effectively "rounded up" a village so that they could savagely 
gunned down.

Every day, at sunrise, Mohammed looks for families who have been bombed. 
He records their stories, standing in the rubble of their homes; he 
takes their pictures. He goes to the hospital. He goes to the morgue. He 
goes to the cemetery. He queues for hours for bread for his own family. 
And he watches the sky. He sends two, three, four dispatches a day. This 
is real journalism.

"They are trying to annihilate us," he told me. "But the more they bomb 
us, the stronger we are. They will never win."

The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something wider and 
menacing to us all.

Since 2001, the United States and its allies have been on a rampage.  In 
Iraq, at least 700,000 men, woman and children are dead as a result. The 
rise of jihadists -- in a country where there was none -- is the result. 
  Known as al-Qaeda and now the Islamic State, modern jihadism was 
invented by US and Britain, assisted by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The 
original aim was to use and develop an Islamic fundamentalism that had 
barely existed in much of the Arab world in order to undermine pan-Arab 
movements and secular governments. By the 1980s, this had become a 
weapon to destroy the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The CIA called it 
Operation Cyclone; and a cyclone it turned out to be, with its unleashed 
fury blowing back in the faces of its creators. The attacks of 9/11 and 
in London in July, 2005 were the result of this blowback, as were the 
recent, gruesome murders of the American journalists James Foley and 
Steven Sotloff. For more than a year, the Obama administration armed the 
killers of these two young men --- then known as ISIS in Syria --- in 
order to destroy the secular government in Damascus.

The West's principal "ally" in this imperial mayhem is the medieval 
state where beheadings are routinely and judicially carried out --- 
Saudi Arabia. Whenever a member of the British Royal Family is sent to 
this barbaric place, you can bet your bottom petrodollar that the 
British government wants to sell the sheiks more fighter planes, 
missiles, manacles. Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, 
which bankrolls jihadists from Syria to Iraq.

Why must we live in this state of perpetual war?

The immediate answer lies in the United States, where a secret and 
unreported coup has taken place.  A group known as the Project for a New 
American Century, the inspiration of Dick Cheney and others,  came to 
power with the administration of George W Bush. Once known in Washington 
as the "crazies", this extreme sect believes in what the US Space 
Command calls "full spectrum dominance".

Under both Bush and Obama, a19th-century imperial mentality has infused 
all departments of state. Raw militarism is ascendant; diplomacy is 
redundant.  Nations and governments are judged as useful or expendable: 
to be bribed or threatened or "sanctioned".

On 31 July, the National Defense Panel in Washington published a 
remarkable document that called for the United States to prepare to 
fight six major wars simultaneously. At the top of the list were Russia 
and China -- nuclear powers.

In one sense, a war against Russia has already begun. While the world 
watched horrified as Israel assaulted Gaza, similar atrocities in 
eastern Ukraine were barely news. At the time of writing, two Ukrainian 
cities of Russian-speaking people -- Donetsk and Luhansk -- are under 
siege: their people and hospitals and schools blitzed by a regime in 
Kiev that came to power in a putsch led by neo-Nazis backed and paid for 
by the United States. The coup was the climax of what the Russian 
political observer Sergei Glaziev describes as a 20-year "grooming of 
Ukrainian Nazis aimed at Russia".  Actual fascism has risen again in 
Europe and not one European leader has spoken against it, perhaps 
because the rise of fascism across Europe is now a truth that dares not 
speak its name.

With its fascist past, and present, Ukraine is now a CIA theme park, a 
colony of Nato and the International Monetary Fund. The fascist coup in 
Kiev in February was the boast of US assistant secretary of state 
Victoria Nuland, whose "coup budget" ran to $5 billion. But there was a 
setback.  Moscow prevented the seizure of its legitimate Black Sea naval 
base in Russian-speaking Crimea. A referendum and annexation quickly 
followed. Represented in the West as the Kremlin's "aggression", this 
serves to turn truth on its head and cover Washington's goals: to drive 
a wedge between a "pariah" Russia and its principal trading partners in 
Europe and eventually to break up the Russian Federation. American 
missiles already surround Russia; Nato's military build-up in the former 
Soviet republics and eastern Europe is the biggest since the second 
world war.

During the cold war, this would have risked a nuclear holocaust. The 
risk has returned as anti-Russian misinformation reaches crescendos of 
hysteria in the US and Europe. A textbook case is the shooting down of a 
Malaysian airliner in July. Without a single piece of evidence, the US 
and its Nato allies and their media machines blamed ethnic Russian 
"separatists" in Ukraine and implied that Moscow was ultimately 
responsible. An editorial in /The Economist/ accused Vladimir Putin of 
mass murder. The cover of /Der Spiegel/ used faces of the victims and 
bold red type, "Stoppt Putin Jetzt!" (Stop Putin Now!) In the /New York 
Times/, Timothy Garton Ash substantiated his case for "Putin's deadly 
doctrine" with personal abuse of "a short, thickset man with a rather 
ratlike face".

The /Guardian's/ role has been important. Renowned for its 
investigations, the newspaper has made no serious attempt to examine who 
shot the aeroplane down and why, even though a wealth of material from 
credible sources shows that Moscow was as shocked as the rest of the 
world, and the airliner may well have been brought down by the Ukrainian 
regime.

With the White House offering no verifiable evidence -- even though US 
satellites would have observed the shooting-down --- the /Guardian's/ 
Moscow correspondent Shaun Walker stepped into the breach. "My audience 
with the Demon of Donetsk," was the front- page headline over Walker's 
breathless interview with one Igor Bezler. "With a walrus moustache, a 
fiery temper and a reputation for brutality," he wrote, "Igor Bezler is 
the most feared of all the rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine ...nicknamed 
The Demon  ... If the Ukrainian security services, the SBU, are to be 
believed, the Demon and a group of his men were responsible for shooting 
down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 ... as well as allegedly bringing 
down MH17, the rebels have shot down 10 Ukrainian aircraft." Demon 
Journalism requires no further evidence.

Demon Journalism makes over a fascist-contaminated junta that seized 
power in Kiev as a respectable "interim government". Neo-Nazis become 
mere "nationalists". "News" sourced to the Kiev junta ensures the 
suppression of a US-run coup and the junta's systematic ethnic cleaning 
of the Russian-speaking population of eastern Ukraine. That this should 
happen in the borderland through which the original Nazis invaded 
Russia, extinguishing some 22 million Russian lives, is of no interest. 
What matters is a Russian "invasion" of Ukraine that seems difficult to 
prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin Powell's 
fictional presentation to the United Nations "proving" that Saddam 
Hussein had WMD. "You need to know that accusations of a major Russian 
'invasion' of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable 
intelligence," wrote a group of former senior US intelligence officials 
and analysts, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "Rather, the 'intelligence' seems to be 
of the same dubious, politically 'fixed' kind used 12 years ago to 
'justify' the U.S.-led attack on Iraq."

The jargon is "controlling the narrative". In his seminal /Culture and 
Imperialism/, Edward Said was more explicit: the western media machine 
was now capable of penetrating deep into the consciousness of much of 
humanity with a "wiring" as influential as that of the imperial navies 
of the 19th century. Gunboat journalism, in other words. Or war by media.

Yet, a critical public intelligence and resistance to propaganda does 
exist; and a second superpower is emerging -- the power of public 
opinion, fuelled by the internet and social media.

The false reality created by false news delivered by media gatekeepers 
may prevent some of us knowing that this new superpower is stirring in 
country after country: from the Americas to Europe, Asia to Africa.  It 
is a moral insurrection, exemplified by the whistleblowers Edward 
Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange. The question begs: will we 
break our silence while there is time?

When I was last in Gaza, driving back to the Israeli checkpoint, I 
caught sight of two Palestinian flags through the razor wire.  Children 
had made flagpoles out of sticks tied together and they'd climbed on a 
wall and held the flag between them.

The children do this, I was told, whenever there are foreigners around, 
because they want to show the world they are there --- alive, and brave, 
and undefeated.

/This article is adapted from John Pilger's Edward Said Memorial 
Lecture, delivered in Adelaide, Australia, on 11 September. Pilger can 
be reached through his website: /www.johnpilger.com/ 
<http://www.johnpilger.com>/

-- 
Freedom Archives 522 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110 415 
863.9977 www.freedomarchives.org
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