[News] Ukraine, Palestine and the propaganda of war

[Anti-Imperialist News]

electronicintifada.net
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/ukraine-palestine-and-propaganda-war/34921>
Ukraine,
Palestine and the propaganda of war

Ali Abunimah <https://electronicintifada.net/people/ali-abunimah> - 28
February 2022
------------------------------
[image: People in a park work over crates full over bottles]

Local residents prepare Molotov cocktails in Uzhhorod, western Ukraine, 27
February. Following Russia’s invasion, people in the country are likely to
become fodder in an escalating superpower confrontation.
Avalon

This video circulated widely on Twitter on Sunday, purporting to be from
Ukraine.

“ ‘Go back to your country’: brave little girl confronts invading Putin’s
Army,” was the description that accompanied it.
Although some people clearly bought it – it has several thousand “likes” –
it didn’t get very far before many Twitter users pointed out that the
landscape, the weather (February in Eastern Europe is very cold) look
nothing like Ukraine.

And they recognized the Palestinian girl in the video: It shows Ahed Tamimi
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/ahed-tamimi> at least 9 years ago
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWlxLq-2RQA>, as she confronts an Israeli
soldier in Arabic.

In 2017 and 2018, the teenaged Tamimi spent eight months
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/palestinians-celebrate-release-ahed-tamimi>
in an Israeli prison, sentenced for a different confrontation with Israeli
soldiers who had invaded Nabi Saleh, her home village in the occupied West
Bank.

Her “crime” was slapping an occupation soldier soon after Israeli forces
shot her 15-year-old cousin in the head, causing horrifying injuries
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-lies-boy-shot-head-fell-bike>
.

Ahed Tamimi was celebrated for bravery all over the world, though not by
the Western governments and media which are glorifying resistance by
Ukrainian civilians to the Russian invasion, including celebrating them for
preparing Molotov cocktails.

All these scenes on the TV of women making Molotov cocktails in Ukraine are
heartwarming.

I very much look forward in future to equally sympathetic media coverage of
Palestinian bombmakers who show equal or arguably greater courage in
fighting terrible military oppression.
— Craig Murray - (@CraigMurrayOrg) February 27, 2022
<https://twitter.com/CraigMurrayOrg/status/1497810802795073537?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

“On the day Vladimir Putin ordered his soldiers into Ukraine, Arina had
planned a dance class after work and then a party. Three days later, the
English teacher was making Molotov cocktails in a park”👇 #dnipro
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/dnipro?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw> #ukraine
<https://twitter.com/hashtag/ukraine?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw> 👇
https://t.co/UFTqmpEJHG
— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) February 27, 2022
<https://twitter.com/sarahrainsford/status/1497827090103783424?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw>

By contrast there has been no outrage at how last week Israeli occupation
forces killed a 13-year-old Palestinian boy
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israeli-forces-fatally-shoot-child-block-ambulance>
allegedly for throwing a Molotov cocktail at foreign forces occupying his
country.

Britain’s Sky News even explained to its viewers how to make a Molotov
cocktail:
That knowledge might come in handy, since the British
<https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-60544838> and Danish
<https://www.msn.com/en-ae/news/world/danish-pm-says-citizen-volunteers-can-join-ukraine-fight/ar-AAUnN2R>
governments are urging their own citizens to travel to Ukraine and take up
arms against the Russian army.

Yes, that’s the same British government that has made it a criminal offense
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/nov/12/man-who-wore-hamas-t-shirt-golders-green-admits-terror-offences>
to wear a T-shirt with the name of Hamas on it.

Hamas is designated by Israel and its Western backers as a “terrorist”
group because it wages armed resistance
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/its-time-change-liberal-discourse-about-hamas/33376>
against Israeli military occupation.
What is likely to happen is that neo-Nazis and far-right thugs from across
Europe will flock to Ukraine to join units like the US-trained
<https://jacobinmag.com/2022/01/cia-neo-nazi-training-ukraine-russia-putin-biden-nato/>
Israeli-armed
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-arming-neo-nazis-ukraine/24876>
neo-Nazi Azov battalion <https://electronicintifada.net/tags/azov-battalion>,
an official unit of Ukraine’s national guard.

The blowback is predictable: Battle-hardened neo-Nazis with views similar
to Norwegian mass killer Anders Breivik
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/anders-behring-breivik> will then
return to their countries to pursue a race war against all those they
perceive as not true Europeans.

On Sunday, Ukraine’s national guard posted a video which it said showed an
Azov fighter smearing his bullets in pig fat, supposedly so that any Muslim
soldiers sent by Russia from Chechnya would be sent straight to hell.
Fake and mislabeled images

The video of Ahed Tamimi is not the only image from Palestine that has been
co-opted into the propaganda war around the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
Last week, an image
<https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/picture-shows-israeli-air-strikes-in-the-gaza-strip-news-photo/1232810997>
of massive explosions hitting buildings in a city at night presented as
being from Ukraine was widely shared
<https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2022/02/24/fact-check-gaza-strip-not-ukraine-pictured-explosion-photo/6922317001/>
on social media.

The Associated Press warned
<https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-969210303435> that the photo was
in fact taken in the Gaza Strip during Israel’s bombardment of the
territory last May
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/may-2021-attack-gaza>.

The French news agency AFP also warned about images of Israeli attacks on
Gaza being passed off as coming from Ukraine:
There has been a flood of fake or falsely labeled images, not just from
Gaza, but also from Beirut and Libya <https://www.bbc.com/news/60513452> or
which are simply years old.

The Ukrainian defense ministry even shared a video clip
<https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-548180451272> that it claimed
showed one of its jets shooting down a Russian warplane. In reality, it was
a clip from a video game.
Sharing fake or mislabeled photos and videos is a common tactic in time of
war in the social media age.

Israel does it habitually
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/israel-posts-fake-videos-justify-gaza-slaughter>
as part of its efforts to justify its attacks on Palestinians.

In the present situation, the urge to share such photos may be driven by
the relative lack of real such images from Ukraine.

To this point, there has been mercifully little bombing inside cities or
dense civilian areas of the kind Israel regularly inflicts on Palestinians.

That may change quickly, especially as the European Union and other
countries supply Ukraine with weapons
<https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ukraine-russia-funding-weapons-budget-military-aid/>
rather than mobilizing all their political and diplomatic resources to
support a ceasefire and negotiations.

The EU regularly lectures Palestinians that violence isn’t a solution but
apparently doesn’t take its own advice.
“Blue eyes and blond hair”

One reason that some people believed that the video of Ahed Tamimi was from
Ukraine is her striking blonde hair.

She looks just like what at least one Ukrainian official and many Western
commentators think a sympathetic victim of war should look like.

Ukrainian prosecutor Davit Sakvarelidze told the BBC that “It’s really
emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde
hair being killed.”
Many similar comments came from Western journalists and pundits, who
pointed out that Ukrainians are easier to sympathize with because they look
like “Europeans.”

Speaking from Kiev, for instance, CBS News correspondent Chris D’Agata said
<https://static1.squarespace.com/static/56f442fc5f43a6ecc531a9f5/t/621bd07b3dbc3174ca6a24ee/1645990011746/AMEJA+Statement+in+response+to+Ukraine+Coverage-2.pdf>
:

“But this isn’t a place, with all due respect, like Iraq or Afghanistan,
that has seen conflict raging for decades. This is a relatively civilized,
relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city,
one where you wouldn’t expect that, or hope that it’s going to happen.”
The sheer racism of such commentary has generated outrage among those who
for years have suffered or watched as Syrians, Afghans, Iraqis, Yemenis,
Libyans, Malians and Palestinians have had their lives and countries
devastated by wars waged by or with the support of the same Western powers
who hypocritically purport to be upholding international law in Ukraine.

Blondeness or whiteness has also been the condition for receiving maximum
sympathy and assistance as a refugee escaping Ukraine, as many people from
African and Asian states working or studying in that country have
discovered:
Selling intervention

The whiteness of Ukrainians may make it easier for Western governments to
sell to their publics escalation and intervention instead of urgent
negotiations to defuse a potentially catastrophic crisis between nuclear
superpowers.

But that is not the whole story.

“If Ukraine wasn’t white it would still generate the same reaction from
Western imperialism and corporate media,” observed Hammam Farah
<https://electronicintifada.net/tags/hammam-farah>, a Palestinian-Canadian
community leader.

“It’s not about their whiteness, but about Ukraine’s geopolitical
significance to American capitalism and the expansion of its empire.”
That observation is correct: When US elites wanted to mobilize support for
the occupation of Afghanistan, the media were full of sympathetic stories
about how intervention was necessary in order to save “Afghan women and
girls.”

Now that the US has withdrawn from Afghanistan, and President Joe Biden is
ensuring
<https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/opinion/afghanistan-starvation-biden.html>
that the country’s population starves, they are all but forgotten.
Who will bleed?

The present war in Ukraine did not start last week with the Russian
invasion – though Moscow’s widely condemned action escalates it to
potentially catastrophic levels.

Its roots go back further to US destabilization of the country and sponsorship
of the 2014 coup by far-right and neo-Nazi elements
<https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/maidan-protests-neo-nazis-russia-nato-crimea>.

Since 2014, there has been a civil war in the east of the country – the
Donbas region where Russia last week recognized two breakaway republics
<https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/ukraine-crisis-highlights-wests-hypocrisy-over-israeli-land-theft>.


More than 5,000 people have been killed in the Donbas conflict, among them
at least 2,700 civilians.

“In many instances of shelling since 2014, the perpetrator has not been
identified, but where they have, Ukrainian separatist forces have been
responsible for at least 667 civilian casualties and Ukraine for 783,”
according
<https://reliefweb.int/report/ukraine/ukraine-catalogue-explosive-weapon-harm-civilians-2014>
to the monitoring group Action on Armed Violence.

No one in Ukraine needs more war.

That, however, is what they will almost certainly get as the US, NATO and
EU answer the Russian invasion with escalation.

On Sunday, the EU announced it would take the unprecedented step of directly
financing
<https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ukraine-russia-funding-weapons-budget-military-aid/>
more than $500 million of arms purchases for Ukraine.

The US is sending in
<https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-news-02-26-22/h_92d1e845587a41545188ed1394c640ff>
hundreds of millions worth of weapons as well.

The total may eventually exceed the $1 billion
<https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/02/world/middleeast/cia-syria-rebel-arm-train-trump.html>
worth of arms the Obama administration sent into Syria, with many weapons
ending up in the hands of groups tied to al-Qaida.

The staging ground for deliveries will be Poland.

Journalist Mark Ames likened that to the role Pakistan played in the 1980s,
when the US used that country as the conduit for weapons and “mujahideen”
into Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army.
The architect of that policy, President Jimmy Carter’s national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, explained later
<https://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/29/cp.00.html> that the goal was
“to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as is possible.”

It didn’t matter to the US how much the Afghan people would bleed, or what
the cost would be in blowback – the 9/11 attacks and the wars that followed
<https://electronicintifada.net/content/global-war-terror-comes-home/33901>.

The media propaganda is once again pushing many Americans and Europeans to
support escalation and intervention, undoubtedly with the same goal.

James Bruno, a State Department veteran who helped implement Brzezinski’s
policy, writes
<https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/02/28/how-to-make-russia-bleed/> this
week in *Washington Monthly*, “It’s time to make Mother Russia bleed for
her crimes. We’ve done it before. We can do it again.”

“Afghanistan, again, offers insights and lessons,” he adds, without a word
of what all this cost for the people of that country.

Ukraine is now likely to suffer the same fate as a battleground for
superpowers, and when all is said and done, the ruined country and its
people will be forgotten as well.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20220301/466faf09/attachment.htm>