Continued from “An Unfolding Pattern of Genocide…” and “Show me the human shields!…”

What truth does power speak about itself, to us? The truth here is not the one commanded by a god to a prophet, Moses (as Guanaguanare analyzes in her essay):

V. You shall not kill.
VII. You shall not steal.
VIII. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
X. You shall not covet your neighbor’s goods.

Instead, the truths that Israeli power speaks appear altogether out of line, entirely inconsistent with the above, by disproportionate leaps and bounds of countless admissions to entertaining dark, genocidal thoughts. As the Israeli state has slowed its recent direct military assault on the civilians of the Gaza prison camp, reinforcing the blockade by air, land, and sea, targeting agriculture with a de facto annexation of what little green land Gaza has, these have been the words of the Apostles of Genocide:

“Israel Warns of Gaza ‘Holocaust’,” BBC News, Fri., Feb. 29, 2008 (subsequently revised ten times by the BBC to diminish the statement):

“The deputy defence minister said the stepped-up rocket fire would trigger what he called a ‘bigger holocaust’ in the Hamas-controlled coastal strip….”The more [rocket] fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they (the Palestinians) will bring upon themselves a bigger holocaust because we will use all our might to defend ourselves,” Matan Vilnai told Israeli army radio.

Level a neighbourhood in Gaza:

After a Palestinian rocket attack, Israel’s Interior Minister urged in late September 2008,

“the IDF should…decide on a neighborhood in Gaza and level it.”

See:

Yaron London, “The Dahiya Strategy” (6 October 2008; www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3605863,00.html); Gabriel Siboni, “Disproportionate Force: Israel’s concept of response in light of the Second Lebanon War,” Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), 2 October 2008. Attila Somfalvi, “Sheetrit: We should level Gaza neighborhoods” (2 October 2008; www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3504922,00.html).

“We will take no one into consideration.”

— Ehud Olmert (See video at Ynet News, “We Should Level Gaza Neighbourhoods,” 02/10/2008.)

There are no innocent civilians in Gaza — From the pupils of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg, in flyers posted in IDF buses — “IDF rabbinate publication during Gaza war: We will show no mercy on the cruel,” Ha’aretz, Amos Harel, Jan. 1, 2009:

In addition to the official publications, extreme right-wing groups managed to bring pamphlets with racist messages into IDF bases. One such flyer is attributed to “the pupils of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg” – the former rabbi at Joseph’s Tomb and author of the article “Baruch the Man,” which praises Baruch Goldstein, who massacred unarmed Palestinians in Hebron. It calls on “soldiers of Israel to spare your lives and the lives of your friends and not to show concern for a population that surrounds us and harms us. We call on you … to function according to the law ‘kill the one who comes to kill you.’ As for the population, it is not innocent … We call on you to ignore any strange doctrines and orders that confuse the logical way of fighting the enemy.”

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert — “Israel vows ‘disproportionate’ response to rockets,” Reuters, Sun., Feb. 1, 2009:

“The government’s position was from the outset that if there is shooting at the residents of the south, there will be a harsh Israeli response that will be disproportionate,” Olmert said at the weekly cabinet meeting after the latest rocket salvo.

“We will act according to new rules which will ensure that we will not be drawn into a war of incessant shooting on the southern border, which would deprive the residents of the south of a normal life,” he said, without elaborating.

The final statement has an air of “final solution” to it. As if it was not a setback for Israeli propaganda that the rest of the world saw Israel initiating the breech of the ceasefire on Nov. 4, 2008, that its action was not a “response”, and that it was a disproportionate use of force, Olmert decides to play up to the atrocity and to adopt the international condemnation as domestic policy — a perfect act of perversity.

••••••• ••••••• ••••••• •••••••

WASHING BLOOD OFF THE WINDOWS OF THE GENOCIDE TANK:

COUNTERPUNCH, February 3, 2009

The Way of Izvestia: The BBC’s Nadir

By MUHAMMAD IDREES AHMAD

Extracts:

…An exhaustive 2004 study by the Glasgow University Media Group – Bad News from Israel – shows that the BBC’s coverage is systematically biased in favour of Israel. It excludes context and history to focus on day-to-day events; it invariably inverts reality to frame these as Palestinian ‘provocation’ against Israeli ‘retaliation’. The context is always Israeli ‘security’, and in interviews the Israeli perspective predominates. There is also a marked difference in the language used to describe casualties on either side; and despite the far more numerous Palestinian victims, Israeli casualties receive more air time.

Many of these findings were subsequently confirmed in a 2006 independent review commissioned by the BBC’s board of governors which found its coverage of the conflict ‘incomplete’ and ‘misleading’. The review highlighted in particular the BBC’s selective use of the word ‘terrorism’ and its failure ‘to convey adequately the disparity in the Israeli and Palestinian experience, reflecting the fact that one side is in control and the other lives under occupation’.

These biases were once more evident in the corporation’s coverage of the recent assault on Gaza. A false sense of balance was sustained by erasing from the narrative the root cause of the conflict: instead of occupier and occupied, we had a ‘war’ or a ‘battle’ – as if between equals. In most stories the word occupation was not mentioned once. On the other hand the false Israeli claim that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005 was frequently repeated, even though access to the strip’s land, sea and airspace remain under Israeli control, and the United Nations still recognizes Israel as the occupying authority. In accepting the spurious claims of one side over the judgment of the world’s pre-eminent multilateral institution, the BBC has already forfeited its impartiality.

The BBC presented the assault as an Israeli war of self defence, a narrative that could only be sustained by effacing the 1,250 Palestinians (including 222 children) killed by the Israeli military between 2005 and 2008. It downplayed the siege which denies Gazans access to fuel, food, water, and medicine. It presented Hamas’s ineffectual rockets as the cause of the conflict when it was Israel’s breech of the six-month truce on November 4 which triggered hostilities. It described the massacre of refugees in an UNRWA compound in the context of Israel’s ‘objectives’ and ‘security’. The security needs of the Palestinians received scant attention. Selective indices were used to create an illusion of balance: instead of comparing Palestinian casualties to those suffered by Israel (more than 1300 to 13) the BBC chose to match them with the number of rockets fired by Hamas. No similar figures were produced for the tonnage of ordnance dropped on the Palestinians.

See also: “Beware of the Israeli Propaganda Machine,” Andy Rowell, SPINWATCH, 13 January 2009.