Monday 28 July 2014

It's not so easy to get away with murder now

On 22 July 2014, Mira Bar-Hillel, the Property and Planning correspondent of The Evening Standard, said this in The Independent:
“Israel has discovered that it's no longer so easy to get away with murder in the age of social media All you now need is a mobile phone and a Twitter account to hold power to account, and help change history…

I arrived in Israel on Christmas Eve 2008, the date chosen by Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead, an attack to end all attacks on Gaza. The tanks rolled in, killing over 1,300 people, many of them women and children, and reducing their homes, schools and hospitals to rubble. But all I heard from the media was that some Israelis were very, very scared because a few primitive rockets were being sent from Gaza into southern Israel.

Reporters were not allowed into Gaza… so the 2008/9 massacre, which included use of the banned White Phosphorus, went un-witnessed and almost unreported. It also failed dismally in achieving its objective, as Hamas survived and the local population’s hatred of their arrogant oppressors burned as bright as the fires which consumed their homes.
But for the ‘international community’ it was ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ Business as usual.

What a difference a few years of developing technology can make. The Gaza atrocities are now being reported on a constant basis by eyewitnesses, be they professional correspondents representing major media organisations, or amateur locals under fire…

It is those devices which brought us heart-rending images – some too horrific to be shown on television – of children with their limbs or half a head blown off. Children covered in shrapnel wounds screaming for dead parents; surviving parents carrying tiny bodies…

This is the shape of wars to come… Historians will finally have both sides’ stories to work from, and the evidence with which to back up their words…
But far more importantly, aggressors will have to live with the consequences of their acts, unable to hide behind hollow rhetoric. Because the Israelis had and have nothing with which to balance those images of bloodied, mangled little corpses in Gaza…

Mass protests marches from California to Chile are taking their toll… The Israeli army is getting more resistance online than on the ground. It’s not used to it and cannot cope.”
Very well said, Mira.

Fingers crossed you’re right about the butchers not being able to cope.

Previously in the 17 July edition of The Independent, Mira had reported thus:
“As a child growing up in Israel, I saw how Palestinians became increasingly dehumanised… Over the past decade we have had “Operation Cast Lead” (2008/9) in which illegal white phosphorus was employed, 1,400 Gazan civilians were killed including one family whose children bled to death on the roof because Israeli aircraft prevented their evacuation. The Israelis lost 11 soldiers.
In “Operation Pillar of Smoke”, (2012) hundreds more Palestinians died.
As far as Israel is concerned, the only change since then (apart from people like the woman who today tweeted that killing Arabs ‘gives me orgasms’) has been that between each attack Hamas’s rockets have increased their range. They are still little more than toys compared with Israel’s smart bombs and heavy artillery and – yes! – nukes, not to mention the sophisticated anti-rocket devices, sirens and shelters which help protect the Israeli population. But they allow Israel to remain, in its own eyes and those of its blinkered backers, always the victim.

Why do Israelis feel like this about people they have only ever overpowered? Growing up in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 60s, I was vaguely aware that we lived in close proximity to ‘The Arabs’… but they might as well have been on another planet. Instead of teaching Arabic as a second language in all schools, to enable us to communicate with our near neighbours, we were taught English, French and even Latin. The only demand for Arabic came from blokes who were looking for a career in military intelligence.

Importantly, back then there were virtually no rockets, no bus explosions, no suicide bombers. But also no respect. The Arabs were not like us, refined Western Jews who went to philharmonic concerts and competed in the Eurovision. They were dirty, smelly, incomprehensible, mildly dangerous, not to be associated with whatsoever. The ones living in Israel were shunned…

It is a short step from that attitude to the de-humanisation of the Palestinians, which is now ubiquitous. And if they’re not quite human, then... well, just look at the news.”
On 11 July 2014, Mira’s essay, ‘Why I'm on the brink of burning my Israeli passport’ appeared in The Independent:

This said:

“She is young. She is pretty. She is a university graduate and a computer engineer. She is also an Israeli Parliamentarian - and the reason why I am on the brink of burning my Israeli passport… Ayelet Shaked represents the far-right Jewish Home party in the Knesset. This means she is well to the right of Benyamin Netanyahu, just in case you thought such a thing was not possible.

On Monday she quoted this on her Facebook page: ‘Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.’
A week earlier, just before 17-year-old Mohammed Abu Khudair was snatched and burned alive, Shaked wrote: ‘This is not a war against terror, and not a war against extremists, and not even a war against the Palestinian Authority. The reality is that this is a war between two people. Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people’…
So even before the boy died horribly she declared him to be the enemy, and afterwards, without any apparent hint of guilt or remorse, she was calling for the deaths of innocent women and their unborn babies…

Today’s Israelis are no longer the victims but the perpetrators of the current crisis… It is Israel which has the tanks, bombers, artillery, nuclear warheads and missile defences of Goliath, while ordinary Gazans had nothing a week ago and even less today, as even hospitals and schools were bombed.

Shaked got what she wanted: the death toll in Gaza is nearing 100, one in four being children. Hundreds more have serious injuries in a place where hospitals have also been bombed and medical essentials are running out.

In Israel, in spite of Hamas’s best efforts, not one death has been recorded, nor any serious injuries, although a wedding party was disrupted and got on the television news.
And, as the bombs rain on Gaza, Israeli teens have taken to tweeting scantily-clad selfies alongside their political sentiments.

In two now deleted tweets, one wrote ‘Death to all of you Arabs you transfag,’ while another proclaimed ‘Arabs may you be paralyzed & die with great suffering!’

‘Another teen simply tweeted ‘Death to these f****** Arabs,’ and attached a photo of themselves pouting alongside it.

Seeing these angelic faces of evil spouting such genocidal rhetoric, I pick up my Israeli passport and a box of matches.

‘Not in my name, people. Not in my name’!”
In the 8 July 2014 edition of The Independent, Mira reported thus:
“What makes young people snatch a stranger their own age, beat him up, force petrol down his throat before setting him on fire? And what makes officers of the law hide their faces, snatch a slight 15-year-old and beat him senseless? And then the police refuse him medical attention until they discover – to their horror - that he is actually an American?

Israel was… born during the War of Independence in 1948, which reset the 1947 borders agreed by the UN and displaced hundreds of thousands of Arabs who became the Palestinian refugees.

The Suez campaign of 1956 hardly affected the civilian population, but the Six Day War in June 1967 did, and continues to do so. Its result was the conquest, by Israel, of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, along with all those refugees.

Victory soon turned into a sense of smug invincibility. Shimon Peres, now Israel’s nonagenarian President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, was the Daddy of the Settlements in the late sixties. He enabled, encouraged and funded small groups of zealots to settle in land illegally occupied in that war…
(In June) Major Ahron Bregman of the Israeli Defense Forces… published his latest book. Its title, Cursed Victory, says it all. Although only nine years old in 1967, his insight into the tragedy of Israel after the Six Day War is impeccable… Within less than a generation of the Jewish Holocaust it began oppressing, persecuting and de-humanising the non-Jewish natives of the occupied territories with predictably bloody results.

Importantly, the book sheds light on the Israeli/USA relationship, portraying a cheeky tail vigorously wagging a massive and powerful dog.

Putting Israel in the driving seat resulted in the failure of all peace initiatives from Clinton/Albright to Obama/Kerry 15 years later…

Kerry could have written the same letter in April of this year, but was reduced to expressing his frustration with Israel timidly, in the face of an overwhelmingly pro-Israel Congress and Republicans funded by billionaire casino Zionist, Sheldon Adelson.
All the woes of the region since 1967 were caused by one thing: the illegal occupation of Palestinian land by Israel, and the USA’s decades-long support for it and its consequences.

Hanging on to the territories has become Israel’s be all and end all, and the US has been left impotent even in the face of one of its own citizens being brutalised by its ‘strongest ally’ this weekend.”
Mira is herself, as you might have guessed, Jewish.

There are lots of honest Jewish truth-tellers abroad in our world trying to get the message out to the rest of us. Perhaps the best and most illustrative example of this is the Jewish S.H.I.T. List. Some Zionist wag (or bunch of same), whose views, I hope, the rest of us would not share, compiled the list. It has around 8,000 names on it and denotes both the concern of huge numbers of Jewish folk at the brute doings of the global elite, particularly the many Zionist Jews within that elite, and the distaste for the 8,000 felt by the S.H.I.T. List’s compilers and their sponsors.

Take a look. There are many more Mira bar-Hillels, Ahron Bregmans and S.H.I.T. List worthies out there than the Jews, Binyamin Netanyahu, Shimon Peres, Ayelet Shaked, Madeleine Albright and Sheldon Adelson, the half-Jew John Kerry, the Gentiles, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and the rest of the bought politicians, media moguls, international financiers and the on-message, up-the-greasy-pole careerists of the western world would have you realise.

Unfortunately, having gone looking for it, I find the site has disappeared! However, some thoughtful person did take a snapshot of the first few pages. This should give you and idea.

As should this.

And this.

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