[News] Netanyahu & Biden lie to justify their crimes against the Palestinians

[Anti-Imperialist News]

english.palinfo.com
<https://english.palinfo.com/articles/2023/10/16/Netanyahu-Biden-lie-to-justify-their-crimes-against-the-Palestinians>
Netanyahu & Biden lie to justify their crimes against the Palestinians
By Motasem Dalloul - October 16, 2023
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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Palestinian
fighters from the besieged Gaza Strip who entered the occupation state at
the weekend as “savages” who “celebrate the murder of women, children and
the elderly.” He made his claim when trying to justify the ongoing campaign
of Israeli air strikes that have so far killed 900 Palestinians, including
260 children and 230 women, and wounded more than 4,500 others.

Netanyahu used the same words to mobilize international support for his
massive ground offensive planned for the coastal enclave. “We are on the
third day of the operation,” he said in a televised speech on Monday. “We
are in an operation for our home, a war to ensure our existence, a war that
we will win.” He told viewers that the war was “imposed upon us by a
despicable enemy.”

He went on to liken the Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, to
Daesh/ISIS: “The atrocities carried out by Hamas have not been seen since
the atrocities of ISIS. Children bound and executed with the rest of their
families, young girls and boys shot in the back, executed… We have always
known what Hamas is. Now the whole world knows. Hamas is ISIS. We will
defeat [Hamas] precisely as the enlightened world defeated ISIS.”

US President Joe Biden joined in this hate-fest on Tuesday: “There are
moments in his life… when the pure, unadulterated evil is unleashed on this
world… This was an act of sheer evil. More than 1,000 civilians
slaughtered… babies being killed, entire families slain… and young women
raped, assaulted, paraded as trophies.”

He also likened Hamas to ISIS. “This is terrorism, which sadly for the
Jewish people, it’s not new. This attack has brought to the surface painful
memories. The scars led by a millennium of anti-Semitism and genocide.” And
where was this anti-Semitism most prevalent, Mr President? Yes, in Europe
and the US.

Biden then reverted to the familiar script: “We must be crystal clear: We
stand with Israel. We stand with Israel, and we will make sure it has what
it needs to take care of its citizens to defend itself and respond to this
attack. There’s no justification for terrorism.”

According to Biden, Hamas does not stand for the Palestinian people’s right
to dignity and self-determination. “Its stated purpose is the annihilation
of the State of Israel and the murder of Jewish people. It uses Palestinian
civilians as human shields and offers nothing but terror and bloodshed with
no regard to who pays the price.”

Both Netanyahu and Biden lied.

Both ignored the fact that resistance against a military occupation is
legitimate under international law. In this case, the Palestinians are
struggling against the longest occupation in history and, some would argue,
the worst. They are not “terrorists” by doing so. Both of them insisted
that all of the Israelis killed by the resistance were civilians, when
hundreds were serving soldiers, men and women. Both claimed that Israelis
were beheaded, including women and children, but no evidence has been
produced for this allegation. Both claimed that women were raped, although
Muslims in an Islamic movement are unlikely to do such a thing.

Israelis who did not challenge the Palestinian fighters were not
“slaughtered”. One woman told Israeli TV i24 that the Palestinian fighters
told her not to worry when she told them that she had children. While the
fighters were in her house, she said that the children were playing on
their mobile phones. She also noted that the fighters did not eat bananas
from her fridge before asking for and getting permission from her.

“I’m getting a lot of questions about the reports of ‘Hamas beheaded
babies’ that were published after the media tour in the village [settlement
of Kfar Azza],” wrote Israeli journalist Oren Ziv on X. “During the tour
[there] we didn’t see any evidence of this, and the army spokesperson or
commanders also didn’t mention any such incidents.”

The claim that Hamas is the same as Daesh/ISIS is ludicrous. Hamas is a
resistance movement that has never operated outside historic Palestine. It
participated in democratic elections in 2006, the last time that the US and
Israel-backed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (whose own
mandate expired in 2009) allowed them to be held. Moreover, it won the
elections and formed the government of the Palestinian Authority, a result
which neither Abbas nor the US and Israel accepted, despite international
monitors describing the polls as “free and fair”. What’s more, there are
claims that ISIS was a black ops creation of the US in order to sow mayhem
and cruelty in the Middle East and discredit Islam and Islamic resistance
against US hegemony in Muslim countries.

Nevertheless, Netanyahu used the same ISIS claim in 2014 to justify the
apartheid state of Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide of the
Palestinian people. “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. They act in the same
way. They are branches of the same poisonous tree. They are two extremist
Islamic terrorist movements that abduct and murder innocents, that execute
their own people, that shrink at nothing including the willful murder of
children.”

Such deceptions are par for the course for both Netanyahu and Biden; it’s
in the job description. Likewise, for other Western governments and their
compliant media outlets. Anyone who opposes their twisted narrative is
discredited as “anti-Semitic”, a terrorist sympathizer or worse. Look at
what happened to Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, hounded out of office by the
pro-Israel lobby. The West is governed by double standards and hypocrisy,
and the Hamas operation at the weekend has exposed that. Victim-blaming is
what they excel at in order to allow Israel to act with impunity. They
expect the Palestinians to just roll over and accept being oppressed and
killed by Israel. We won’t play their evil game by their rules.

*- Motasem A Dalloul is MEMO’s correspondent in the Gaza Strip.*
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