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<h1 class="reader-title">A Dictionary of Media Terms for the
Palestine/Israel 'Conflict</h1>
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<div class="reader-estimated-time"><i><span>– Roger Sheety -
April 2, 2019<br>
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<p><span>What is the point of journalism if not to
question, doubt, and challenge state or elite power?
If a journalist merely reports the standard talking
points of that power (as most corporate media
journalists do), isn’t he or she simply perpetuating
the basic premise of those talking points, that all is
fundamentally well with the status quo? How, then, can
such a stance be thought of as fair, objective, or
impartial?</span></p>
<p><span>The following piece is partially indebted to John
Ralston Saul’s “</span><span>The Doubter’s Companion:
A Dictionary of Aggressive Common Sense”</span><span>,
which itself was partly inspired by earlier
dictionaries such as those by Samuel Johnson and
Ambrose Bierce. </span></p>
<p><span>The aim of these anti-dictionary dictionaries was
to challenge and mock conventional wisdom and use
language to clarify and communicate rather than the
opposite. </span></p>
<p><span>As Saul eloquently puts it: </span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span>“In the humanist view, the alphabet can be a
tool for examining society; the dictionary a series
of questions, an inquiry into meaning, a weapon
against received wisdom and therefore against the
assumptions of established power. In other words,
the dictionary offers an organized Socratic
approach.”</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>But my main source of inspiration must go to the
mainstream corporate media whose obfuscation,
censorship, propaganda, hypocrisy, and outright lies
in the service of state and elite corporate
power—particularly on the Palestine issue—for decade
after decade is really something to behold. It must
truly be hard work to constantly not report the
obvious, to use language to confuse rather than to
clarify, to fabricate and perpetuate myths, and to
de-contextualize what calls out for context.</span></p>
<p><span>Thus, in no particular order:</span></p>
<p><span><strong>The Peace Process (Oslo, 1993 to the
present time version)</strong>: A failed attempt to
convince the Palestinian people that their violent
dispossession and ethnic cleansing from their homeland
is just, legal, and sanctified. The first peace
process began in 1919 when the World Zionist
Organization presented its</span><a
href="http://www.1948.org.uk/maps/historical-maps/2874631">
<span>map of peace</span></a><span> at the Paris Peace
Conference. This map of peace included the WZO’s
peaceful colonial wish to take all of Palestine,
southern Lebanon, Syria’s Golan, parts of Egypt’s
Sinai, and parts of western Jordan to create a
“national home of the Jews.” Rejected by European
elites at the time, they would soon after consent to
the theft once British and French colonial rule over
the entire Arab world was established and
consolidated.</span></p>
<p><span>What would be obvious to a child somehow escapes
the cognitive abilities of the majority of corporate
news media editors today: that all the land that
Zionists pined for in 1919, and which they officially
and openly presented for all the world to see, would
be nearly the exact same land they would eventually
conquer and steal or, in the case of Lebanon and
Egypt, attempt to conquer and steal. In corporate
media speak, this entire history of theft is sometimes
referred to as “too complicated to understand.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Disputed</strong>: All land which Israel
steals, including Palestinian, Syrian, Lebanese, and
Egyptian land, is known in Western corporate media
speak as “disputed” land. In the real world, this is
known as theft.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Peace</strong>: A word that now means the
opposite of its actual meaning. In
Israeli/Zionist/Western thinking, peace means that
Israelis are allowed to kill Palestinians, steal their
land, ethnically cleanse them from their homes,
demolish their homes, occupy them, and place them
permanently under siege with impunity and without
resistance. Israelis can then peacefully return to
their nice stolen homes in Haifa, ‘Akka (Acre), Jaffa,
Jerusalem, Tiberias, and Safad (among other
Palestinian cities) to peacefully eat and sleep there
until they are ready for the next day’s peaceful
bombing, plundering, and looting of Palestinians in
Gaza and the West Bank.</span></p>
<p><span>Palestinians are also expected to have dialogue,
hold hands, and sing campfire songs with Israelis
while the Israeli terrorist army continues its assault
on what is left of Palestine; this is known in
corporate media speak as “working for peace.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Israel”</strong>: An extremely violent,
racist, supremacist colonial settler state established
entirely on stolen Palestinian land, through the
expulsion of its indigenous people, and through the
destruction of hundreds of ancient Palestinian cities,
towns, and villages; an apartheid state that is armed
to the teeth with nuclear and other weapons of mass
destruction and, therefore, a danger to the entire
world. Not Jewish and not democratic, despite its
hysterical and childish insistence on being recognized
and called as such. For obvious reasons, not
recognized by the overwhelming majority of the
Palestinian people.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Zionism</strong>: An extremely violent,
racist, supremacist imperial/colonial ideology
originating in 19</span><span>th</span><span> century
Europe and which has deep roots in that continent’s</span><a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)"> <span>Orientalism</span></a><span>.
The fantastical notion often put forth by apologists
of Israel that Zionism is merely a benign form of
nationalism is only belied by a century of land theft,
dispossession of the indigenous people of Palestine,
and the continuing destruction of their homeland,
including its 2014 genocidal</span><a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/rania-khalek/israels-extermination-whole-families-gaza-reflects-genocidal-impulse">
<span>attack</span></a><span> on the Palestinians of
Gaza which wiped 89 families and over 2100 human
beings off the face of the earth. As with any other
ideology, one simply has to observe its effect on its
victims and the world at large to judge its value,
rather than what its professional propagandists say
and write. Also: an ahistorical, false conflation of
Judaism, Jews, and apologists for Israel; a form of
White supremacy. An anachronism; see also: Christian
Zionism.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Palestine</strong>: Primarily, Palestine
is the homeland of the Palestinian people from the
Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. For some, this
is “The Holy Land”; though why this land is more holy
than, for example, Lebanon or Syria or Bolivia or
Japan or Turtle Island (North America) or anywhere
else, is not clear.</span></p>
<p><span>What is truly baffling, however, is why the
indigenous people of the Holy Land—that is, the
Palestinians—are being persecuted, expelled from their
homes, and massacred in large numbers for year after
year, as the “international community” watches on.
Perhaps a new definition of “holy” is required, one
that is more suitable to the backward and upside down
ideology of Zionism.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Resistance</strong>: All peoples without
exception have the right to resist imperial/colonial
conquest, occupation, and invasion in whatever means
possible. No American or Canadian, for instance, would
tolerate an unwanted stranger into her or his home and
would naturally resist such an intrusion. Why the West
and corporate media insist that Palestinians must be
the sole exception to this universally recognized and
understood right remains a mystery.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Theodore Herzl</strong>: The founder of
Zionism and the hero of Israel. In his remarkably
dull, naive, and racist 1896 pamphlet, “</span><span>Der
Judenstaat”</span><span> (German for “The State of the
Jews”), wherein he outlines his colonial dream, Herzl
would actually blame European Jews for their own
persecution. Thus, he</span><a
href="https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/quot-the-jewish-state-quot-theodor-herzl">
<span>writes</span></a><span>: “The</span><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_question"> <span>Jewish
question</span></a><span> exists wherever Jews live
in perceptible numbers. Where it does not exist, it is
carried by Jews in the course of their migrations. We
naturally move to those places where we are not
persecuted, and there our presence produces
persecution. This is the case in every country and
will remain so, even in those highly civilized—for
instance, France—until the Jewish question finds a
solution on a political basis. The unfortunate Jews
are now carrying the seeds of Anti-Semitism into
England; they have already introduced it into
America.”</span></p>
<p><span>Herzl also considered Jews as “a race,” spoke of
Jewish immigrants as “infiltrators,” and regarded the
indigenous Arabs of the entire Arab world as savages.
“We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe
against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to
barbarism,” he would write, paving the way for the
Israeli barbarism to come. When one looks at Israeli
society today, one can, therefore, understand why this
exceptionally anti-humanist and racist thinker is
viewed there with such reverence. See: Anti-Semitism.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Anti-Semitism</strong>: Very simply and
uncontroversially, hatred of or hostility to Jews as
Jews. The attempt by Zionists to change the meaning of
anti-Semitism and equate it with criticism and
rejection of Israel is as insidious and erroneous as
Israel’s (false) claim to represent and speak on
behalf of world Jewry. Indeed, this latter claim can
itself be viewed as anti-Semitic as it presumes that
world Jewry is a monolithic entity that supports
Israel’s destruction of Palestine, its apartheid, and
its occupation. As Omar Barghouti</span><a
href="http://youtu.be/8QODAPfPAaw?t=21m25s"> <span>says</span></a><span>:
“Anyone who says, ‘All Jews are…’ (anything that comes
after ‘are’) is an anti-Semite… [this] dehumanizes
Jews; it makes them more or less human, but not
human.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Oil/gas/petrol</strong>: Implicitly,
according to Western punditry, all oil belongs to the
United States of America, regardless of whose land and
what body of water it happens to be under. See, for
example, the United States’ current attempt to install
a puppet regime in Venezuela.</span></p>
<p><span>Arabs: The indigenous peoples of much of what is
today called the “Middle East.” Contrary to racist,
Western generalizations, Arabs are multi-religious,
multi-cultural, multi-tempered, and multi-faceted—like
all other peoples around the world.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>The West</strong>: A mythical political
alliance/entity led (read: bullied) by the United
States of America and with no connection to
geographic, historical, or socio-cultural realities
whatsoever; a total fiction.</span></p>
<p><span>The United States of America: An empire with more
than 730 military bases around the world, which spends</span><a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_expenditures">
<span>six times</span></a><span> more on its military
and weapons of mass destruction than its nearest
rival, which regularly</span><a
href="https://williamblum.org/chapters/rogue-state/united-states-bombings-of-other-countries"><span>
bombs</span></a><span> weaker nations, which
regularly</span><a
href="https://williamblum.org/books/killing-hope"> <span>subverts</span></a><span>
democratic movements in other countries all around the
world, which spies on its own citizens and
incarcerates them in disproportionately high numbers,
and which insists that it is not an empire. See also:
“Honest Broker.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Radical</strong>: One of the fundamental
messages of such American scholars as Michael Parenti,
Noam Chomsky, William Blum, Chalmers Johnson, Howard
Zinn, Tom Engelhardt, and Chris Hedges, for example,
is that the United States cannot be a properly
functioning democracy at home and, at the same time,
wreak havoc abroad as an empire. Sooner or later, they
argue, things at home begin to fall apart, not to
mention all the enemies the empire creates in its
ceaseless wars around the world through its industry
of death. In the corporate mainstream media, this
commonsense and even classically conservative view is
known as being “radical” and is, thus, virtually
ignored. Such writers are also effectively shut out
from corporate media discourse because of their
“radicalism.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>The Holocaust</strong>: The destruction
of European Jewry in Europe by other Europeans.
Despite having nothing to do with Palestine, or Syria,
or Lebanon, or Egypt, or Iraq for that matter,
Zionists and other Israel apologists insist on
justifying the destruction of Palestine, her people,
and other countries in the region with the
Holocaust—to the horror of humanists everywhere.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>The Right to Exist</strong>: All human
beings, without exception, have the right to exist.
States, corporations, and racist ideologies being
abstractions—albeit with deadly consequences—however,
do not have the right to exist. See Nazi Germany,
apartheid South Africa, and the United Fruit Company
for instance.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Palestine/Israel “Conflict”</strong>: A
corporate media abstraction used to cover up and
obfuscate the continuing destruction of Palestine by
creating a false balance and ethical equivalency
between the colonizers and the colonized where no such
balance and equivalency exists to begin with. See
also: “Both sides.”</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Both sides”</strong>: A favored term
among so-called “liberal” politicians and pundits
alike. Palestinians have their olive trees uprooted by
the thousands, their farms burned, their homes
destroyed, their land stolen, their ancient towns and
villages razed, their history and culture
appropriated, and their children shot, maimed, and
murdered by Israel. But who is responsible? Nobody in
corporate (liberal) media circles seems to know for
sure; it must be then that “both sides” are to blame.</span></p>
<p><span>Other “both sides” phrases repeated ad nauseam
include: “both sides are being unhelpful,” “both sides
must make painful compromises for peace,” and “both
sides must come to the table.” Why Palestinians are to
blame for their ethnic cleansing and dispossession and
why they must compromise their inalienable human
rights to their own oppressors is never made clear by
these faux liberal pundits. (For the corporate
right-wing media, it is clear who bears the blame—the
Palestinians of course.)</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Pro-Israel”</strong>: Because “Israel”
was established through ethnic cleansing, massacres,
and the wholesale destruction of hundreds of ancient
Palestinian towns and villages, and because the state
is maintained through racist apartheid laws, military
occupation, and regular massacres particularly in
Gaza, then “Pro-Israel” must mean that one is
pro-ethnic cleansing, pro-massacres, pro-apartheid,
and pro-destruction of indigenous peoples.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Saudi Arabia</strong>: America’s number
one all-time favorite dictatorship in the Arab world.
In corporate media speak, Saudi Arabia is sometimes
referred to as a “moderate” Arab state. Other moderate
Arab states include Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab
Emirates, and Morocco. Moderate Arab states are
distinguished from non-moderate Arab states by their
brutality to their own citizens and, even more
importantly, their subservience to the United States
and, thus, to Israel.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Hasbara</strong>: Literally,
“explanation” but in effect and practice, propaganda
and fabrication. According to Israel, it is very
difficult for the rest of world to understand why
Israel continues to steal Palestinian land, bomb
Palestinian neighborhoods and refugee camps, and
generally kill any Palestinian who gets in the way. It
is also much too hard, according to Israel, for the
world to understand why it continues to occupy Syrian
land, bomb Syrian territory, and terrorize Lebanese,
especially in southern Lebanon. Therefore, it must be
“explained” to the rest of the dim world why indeed
Israel is doing all these horrible things because it’s
too complicated and, besides, Israel is in a “tough
neighborhood” (that is, in a region that doesn’t like
being bombed, invaded, and dispossessed).</span></p>
<p><span>It is a special type of collective delusion when
an entire state even feels it necessary to create
propaganda “fellowships,” whole government
departments, and even international tours featuring
its paid propagandists whose entire purpose is to
fabricate silly tales to excuse and justify the
state’s crimes against humanity. What that word or
term for this collective delusion is, has yet to be
invented.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Honest Broker”</strong>: Like “Peace,” a
phrase that now means the opposite of its actual
meaning. In the real world, “honest broker” would mean
someone or some organization that is simultaneously
knowledgeable and disinterested in the final outcome
of a particular conflict and therefore qualified to
help reach a settlement; usually respected by the
parties involved. In the make-believe world of
corporate media, however, the “honest broker” between
Palestinians and Israelis is the United States—the
same state that has given Israel over $233.7 billion
in</span><a
href="http://www.haaretz.com/business/u-s-aid-to-israel-totals-233-7b-over-six-decades.premium-1.510592">
<span>military and other aid</span></a><span> since
1948, which rearms it whenever it wishes, particularly
as it slaughters Palestinians, which provides special
treatment for Israeli companies via elite business
“free trade” agreements, and which gives it unlimited
diplomatic cover and support.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Demographic Threat</strong>: A racist
Israeli term used to dehumanize and demonize
Palestinians, particularly infants. Once upon a time,
such racist terms were mostly used by Israelis; today,
though, even nominally liberal Americans have adopted
them as their own in speeches and newspaper articles,
and so use such terms to</span><a
href="http://www.palestinechronicle.com/the-real-cycle-of-violence/#.VAJnxWd0wqQ">
<span>justify</span></a><span> and normalize the
killing and continued dispossession of Palestinians.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Palestinians</strong>: The indigenous
people of Palestine. See also: Diaspora.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Diaspora</strong>: The majority of the
indigenous people of Palestine live in Diaspora due
mainly to the fact that either they or their parents
or their grandparents were expelled from Palestine
beginning mostly in 1948 and continuing on to the
present day, and not allowed to return. David
Ben-Gurion (that is, David Green), one of the main
architects of the Palestinian Diaspora, wrote in a</span><a
href="http://www.palestineremembered.com/download/B-G%20LetterTranslation.pdf">
<span>1937 letter</span></a><span> to his son: “We
must expel Arabs and take their place.” The</span><a
href="http://pbble.com/doc/Khalidi-Plan-Dalet.pdf"> <span>planned
expulsion</span></a><span> of the Palestinians would
by 1948 be formalized in what the Zionist leadership
named “Plan Dalet.” Yet, despite Zionists saying they
would expel and take the place of Palestinians,
despite carefully planning one of the largest ethnic
cleansing operations in a century, and despite
carrying out the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in full
view of the world, the Palestinian Diaspora remains
for the corporate mainstream media a source of
bewilderment and mystery.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Right of Return</strong>: A taboo topic
in the corporate press for some puzzling reason. All
peoples of the world without exception have the right
to return to their homes and land in the event of
displacement. The Palestinian Right of Return is based
entirely on universally recognized morality, ethics,
and international law. In corporate media speak and
even academe, however, the Right of Return is
“controversial” and “problematic.” Not controversial
or problematic, apparently, is Israel’s wholly
fabricated, sectarian, and racist “Law of Return” and
“Birthright” programme which allows Jews (especially
White ones) from anywhere in the world and with no
roots whatsoever in Palestine to “return” to a place
they have never been to, given instant Israeli
citizenship, and join the Israeli “Defense Forces” to
kill and drive Palestinians off their land and out of
their homes into a state of Diaspora.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>BDS—Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions</strong>:
Currently, the most effective non-violent form of
resistance to the genocidal Israeli colonial-settler
project in Palestine. For more information, please
visit</span><a href="http://www.bdsmovement.net/"> <span>http://www.bdsmovement.net/</span></a><span>
and</span><a href="https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi"> <span>https://bdsmovement.net/pacbi</span></a><span>.
According to Israel and its media apologists, this is
the way Palestinians want to “destroy Israel”—through
human rights, equality, and justice.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Al Nakba</strong>: The destruction of
Palestine which continues to this day; carried out by
European and Russian Zionist colonists and aided and
enabled by Britain, Europe, the United States, and
much of the West. Rarely, if ever, mentioned as the
actual source of the Palestine/Israel “conflict” in
the mainstream press. For more details, please visit</span><a
href="http://www.palestineremembered.com/"> <span>Palestine
Remembered.com</span></a><span>, Dr. Salman Abu
Sitta’s</span><a href="http://www.plands.org/"> <span>Plands.org</span></a><span>,
and</span><a href="http://zochrot.org/en"> <span>Zochrot.org</span></a><span>.
See also </span><i><span>All That Remains: The
Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by
Israel in 1948</span></i><span>, edited by Walid
Khalidi, one of Palestine’s greatest scholars and
historians.</span></p>
<p><span>Further, to understand how </span><span>al-Nakba</span><span>
continues on to this day and how it affects
Palestinians worldwide, see </span><span>Palestine
Chronicle</span><span>, </span><span>Ma’an News
Agency</span><span>, </span><span>Electronic Intifada</span><span>,
and </span><span>Mondoweiss</span><span>, four
independent news websites which have consistently
published Palestinian voices without the censorship
and pandering to power so common in corporate news
media. Despite their large online following, it is
surreal how such independent news sites are never
referenced within corporate media as if they did not
exist at all.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Terrorism</strong>: All colonial settler
states, such as Israel for example, are essentially
established through terrorism. Imperialism and
colonialism are also inherently terrorist and even
genocidal, which explains why corporate media never
regards the terrorism of the United States, Israel, or
other colonial settler states as terrorism.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Cycle of Violence”</strong>: A corporate
media term meant to signify complexity and nuance,
particularly regarding Palestinian violence, but which
actually explains nothing and in effect positions
Israel as the victim of the Palestinian people who it
bombs incessantly as it dispossesses them. The “Cycle
of Violence” would indeed be an accurate term if those
using it would acknowledge the true initiator of
violence. Thus, the colonial settler conquers, kills,
and steals, and the indigenous native
responds, defends and reacts. Or as the quintessential
colonial settler David Ben-Gurion (that is, David
Green) put it in 1938:</span></p>
<p><span>“Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves… A
people which fights against the usurpation of its land
will not tire so easily…politically we are the
aggressors and they defend themselves… The country is
theirs, because they inhabit it, whereas we want to
come here and settle down, and in their view, we want
to take away from them their country” (</span><span>Zionism
and the Palestinians</span><span>, Simha Flapan,
141–142).</span></p>
<p><span><strong>ISIS</strong>: A terrorist organization
which recruits its terrorist fighters worldwide and is
based on fundamentalist, violent, and extreme
interpretations of a religion.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>IDF</strong>: A terrorist organization
which recruits its terrorist fighters worldwide and is
based on fundamentalist, violent, and extreme
interpretations of a religion.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Two-state solution”</strong>: The
process whereby Israel continues to steal the
remaining 22 percent of Palestine it could not steal
in 1948. According to this solution, sanctified by the
international community, Palestinians are supposed to
“negotiate” with their dispossessors, conquerors, and
oppressors for this remaining 22 percent as it is
being stolen right from under them and with the help
and cover of the honest broker, the United States, and
its client states.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Objectivity</strong>: Frantz Fanon, one
of the greatest theorists of colonialism, understood
that objectivity in the colonial sphere always
reinforces the imperial narrative. Thus in</span><span> “The
Wretched of the Earth”,</span><span> he writes: “The
nationalist leaders know that international opinion is
forged solely by the Western press. When a Western
journalist interviews us, however, it is seldom done
to render us service. In the war in Algeria, for
example, the most liberal-minded French reporters make
constant use of ambiguous epithets to portray our
struggle. When we reproach them for it, they reply in
all sincerity they are being objective. For the
colonized subject, objectivity is always directed
against him”.</span></p>
<p><span>In her Foreword to “</span><span>Censored 2014:
Fearless Speech in Fateful Times”</span><span>, Sarah
van Gelder similarly writes: </span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span>“Journalists are considered objective when
their reporting accepts the dominant worldview as a
given, without questioning beliefs and assumptions
that may or may not hold up to scrutiny. The good
journalist, in other words, goes along with the
worldview of the powerful”.</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>In the Palestine/Israel context, thus, Western
journalists who live in stolen Palestinian homes, who
never speak to Palestinians whose homes are demolished
on a daily basis, who never speak to Palestinian
families whose daughters and sons and fathers and
mothers are shot and killed by occupying “soldiers” on
a daily basis, who repeat official Israeli talking
points without critique, and who are seemingly
clueless on the contextual background of the very
subject they are reporting on, are known as objective,
serious journalists.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Iran</strong>: Iran has no nuclear
weapons, has been heavily economically sanctioned by
the United States and its client states, is surrounded
by U.S. military bases, and was a victim of the joint
British-U.S.-orchestrated coup in 1953 wherein
democratically elected Mohammad Mosaddegh was
overthrown and Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, a brutal fascist
dictator, was installed. As it never accepted
U.S.-British dictate, Iran was, and still is,
considered a threat to the West. Israel, on the other
hand,</span><a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel">
<span>actually has nuclear weapons</span></a><span>,
refuses to acknowledge their existence, refuses to
have them inspected, and is, therefore, a real and
major nuclear threat to the world. So normalized are
Israeli violence and threats by the West, however,
that such basic facts are rarely discussed seriously
in the corporate news media.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Egypt</strong>: Once upon a time, the
most powerful Arab state, a center of Arab culture and
positive, open nationalism led by Gamal Abdel Nasser
(hated by Western elites). Today, it is the most
subservient Arab state to the United States and
Israel, sectarian, and led by a third-rate, tin-pot
dictator (loved by Western elites).</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Edward Wadie Said</strong>: Arguably the
greatest writer and thinker to emerge from the Arab
world in the last one hundred years, writing entirely
in English; author and editor of dozens of books and
essays; with an astounding 40-year academic career
that included teaching at Columbia University, Harvard
College, and Yale University among others; and a
founding figure of postcolonial studies. He also
happened to be Palestinian and a fierce critic of U.S.
imperialism and, therefore, mostly ignored by the
mainstream press during much of his lifetime.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>“Shared values”</strong>: A common phrase
used by both elected and unelected elites, and their
paid media propagandists (particularly in North
America and Europe), to indicate their shared
corruption, hypocrisy, and criminality. In 1967, for
example, Israel invaded and stole the rest of
Palestine—the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, as
well as Syria’s Golan and Egypt’s Sinai, killing at
least 22,000 Arabs and expelling at least another
300,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and 130,000
Syrians from the Golan. In the process, Israel would
ethnically cleanse and destroy several more ancient
Palestinian villages including</span><a
href="http://www.palestineremembered.com/al-Ramla/Imwas/">
<span>‘Imwas</span></a><span>, Beit Nuba, and Yalu. On
the ruins of these villages and stolen Palestinian
land, an artificial public garden, the so-called
“Canada Park,” was created with the help of the Jewish
National Fund of Canada for some $15 million Canadian,
all tax-deductible of course.</span></p>
<p><span>Because both Israel and Canada are based on the
theft and appropriation of indigenous people’s land,
culture, and history, “Canada Park” therefore
symbolizes the “shared values” of the two colonial
settler states.</span></p>
<p><span><strong>Christian Zionism</strong>: A belief in
the supremacy of White Christians to all other people
in the world. A belief, also, in the non-existence or
magical invisibility of the Palestinian people summed
up here in 1865 by William Thomson, Archbishop of
York, and quoted from Basem Ra’ad’s crucial</span><a
href="http://www.hiddenhistories.ca/"> <i><span>Hidden
Histories: Palestine and the Eastern Mediterranean</span></i></a><span>:</span></p>
<blockquote>
<p><span>“This country of Palestine belongs to </span><i><span>you</span></i><span>
and to </span><i><span>me</span></i><span>, it is
essentially ours. It was given to the Father of
Israel in the words: ‘Walk through the land in the
length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will
give it unto thee.’ </span><i><span>We</span></i><span>
mean to walk through Palestine in the length and in
the breadth of it, because that land has been given
unto us. It is the land from which comes news of our
Redemption. It is the land towards which we turn as
the fountain of all our hopes; it is the land to
which we may look with as true a patriotism as we do
to this dear old England, which we love so much”
(Ra’ad, 125).</span></p>
</blockquote>
<p><span>Thus, the indigenous people of Palestine were
made to notionally disappear before the attempt to
make them physically disappear later on in the 20</span><span>th</span><span>
century. Although European and North American pilgrims
would continue to visit Palestine throughout the 19</span><span>th</span><span>,
20</span><span>th</span><span>, and 21</span><span>st</span><span>
centuries, they would, with rare exceptions, persist
in not seeing the people whose homeland they coveted.</span></p>
<p><i><span> – Roger Sheety is a freelance editor and
writer, and has published essays and articles for
the Palestine Chronicle and the Middle East Eye. He
contributed this article to the Palestine Chronicle.
He tweets at: </span></i><a
href="https://twitter.com/ibinfalasteen?lang=en"><i><span>https://twitter.com/ibinfalasteen?lang=en</span></i></a></p>
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