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Weekend Edition September 12-14, 201<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="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/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>Breaking the Last Taboo</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Gaza and the Threat of World War</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by JOHN PILGER</div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Nothing has changed since the Zionists’ infamous “Plan D” in
1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people. Recently, on the
website of the <i>Times of Israel</i> 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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>I replied, “That’s exactly what happened.”</p>
<p>“No,” he said, “it did <em>not</em> happen.”</p>
<p>Such a lie or delusion is repeated unerringly by Israel’s
apologists. As the former <i>New York Times</i> 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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>Something is different now. There is a huge revulsion across
the world; and the voices of <i>sensible</i> 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.</p>
<p>One sensible liberal voice, the novelist Ian McEwan, was being
celebrated as a sage by the <i>Guardian</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>In 1937, with Adolf Hitler in power, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of
<i>The Times</i> 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.”</p>
<p>On 30 July, the BBC offered viewers a masterclass in the Dawson
Principle. The diplomatic correspondent of the programme <i>Newsnight</i>,
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.</p>
<p>As for the British invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, they
didn’t happen, either.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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].”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“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.</p>
<p>“In 1938, the Nazis called the Jews <i>Untermenschen</i> –
subhuman. Today, Palestinians are treated as a subhuman people
who can be slaughtered without any in power reacting.</p>
<p>“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.”</p>
<p>There are dangers in telling this truth, in breaching what
Edward Said called “the last taboo”. My documentary, <i>Palestine
Is Still the Issue</i>, 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.</p>
<p>Something similar happened to the Australian commentator Mike
Carlton last month. In his regular column in the <i>Sydney
Morning Herald</i>, 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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>The <i>Herald</i> demanded he apologise. When he refused, he
was suspended, then he resigned. According to the <i>Herald’s</i>
publisher, Sean Aylmer, the company “expects much higher
standards from its columnists.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>“They are trying to annihilate us,” he told me. “But the more
they bomb us, the stronger we are. They will never win.”</p>
<p>The great crime committed in Gaza is a reminder of something
wider and menacing to us all.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Why must we live in this state of perpetual war?</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <i>The Economist</i> accused Vladimir Putin of
mass murder. The cover of <i>Der Spiegel</i> used faces of the
victims and bold red type, “Stoppt Putin Jetzt!” (Stop Putin
Now!) In the <i>New York Times</i>, Timothy Garton Ash
substantiated his case for “Putin’s deadly doctrine” with
personal abuse of “a short, thickset man with a rather ratlike
face”.</p>
<p>The <i>Guardian’s</i> 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.</p>
<p>With the White House offering no verifiable evidence – even
though US satellites would have observed the shooting-down — the
<i>Guardian’s</i> 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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>The jargon is “controlling the narrative”. In his seminal <i>Culture
and Imperialism</i>, 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><i>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: <a
href="http://www.johnpilger.com"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.johnpilger.com']);"><i>www.johnpilger.com</i></a></i></p>
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