Wednesday 30 July 2014

Telegenically dead Palestinians

On 20 July 2014, US Secretary of State, John Kerry, was seen saying this on CNN:
"Nobody, no human being can be comfortable with children being killed, but we're not comfortable with Israeli soldiers being killed either."
Midway through 30 July 2014, 1324 Palestinians had been killed and 52 Israeli soldiers. Most of the Palestinians who died were civilians, many of them women and children. The Israelis soldiers who died were invading Palestinian territory.

Hey, John would you feel more comfortable if none of the invaders had been killed? if the score sheet, for example, had been 1,324 - nil? You know, if America's favourite people had been allowed to butcher the innocent without anything in the way of retribution at all.

Not much moral equivalence between invaders killing 1,324 and defenders killing 52, John.

Not outside the asylum, there isn't.

Earlier that day, Israel's Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, was inteviewed by CNN's Wolf Blitzer.

During the interview, he said this:
“All civilian casualties are unintended by us, but actually intended by Hamas. They want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can, because somebody said they use, it’s gruesome, THEY USE TELEGENICALLY DEAD PALESTINIANS for their cause... The more dead the better.”
Is Netanyahu actually complaining here that the Palestinian dead look unpleasantly dead. To an exaggerated degree? I think he is. I mean, is he really so bound up in his tribal spin that he thinks we might possibly fall for such ridiculous not-us-Gov nonsense?

Thing is, though the mainstream media is still mostly onside, social media is all over this. Israel is losing the public relations war hands down and when you're forever having to dream up ways of excusing the inexcusable you're almost bound to spout b***ocks once in a while.

In New York's Daily Intelligencer, Benjamin Wallace-Wells hit the spot.

Responding to Netanyahu's puerile attempt to deflect blame for Israel's latest genocidal adventure, he said this:

"If Netanyahu is so bothered by how dead Palestinians look on television then he should stop killing so many of them."
Pertinently, Benjamin also said:
"Social media have helped allow us to see more deeply inside war zones, in this case, inside Gaza, and allowed viewers much fuller access to the terror that grips a population under military attack... The sheer imbalance in the human toll, in the numbers of dead, has been impossible to elide or ignore.

None of this is likely to change the politics of America's relationship with Israel. The U.S.'s support for Israel wasn't arrived at arbitrarily, and it has withstood some similarly ugly episodes in the past. Palestine is still ruled by ugly politics. But more subtly, I think the way the last two weeks have unfolded in the Western media has made it more difficult for Americans not personally invested in the conflict to simply assume that the Israelis are necessarily right.

There is a reason that apolitical celebrities like Dwight Howard and Rihanna were tweeting out messages of support for Palestine. They, like the rest of us, are seeing the Palestinians a little bit less as demagogues and terrorists and a little bit more as they see themselves, as ordinary people living in often impossible circumstances."
'They use telegenically dead Palestinians.'

Grotesque is not the word.

Ladies and gentlemen, in case you haven't noticed, the lunatics are no longer running the aforementioned asylum.

There out here with us, slaughtering the innocent in huge numbers.

They have been doing so for quite some time.

UPDATE

During the Wolf Blitzer interview, Netanyahu also said this:
"Hamas is using them, Palestinians, as human shields... Against such a cynical, brutal, heartless enemy, we try to minimize civilian casualties. We try to target the military targets."
On Wednesday 30 July Israel bombed a school in the UN-protected Jabaliya refugee camp where more than 3,000 displaced civilians had taken refuge.

At least 16 people, most of them children, were killed as they slept.

The BBC reported thus:
"Chris Gunness, a spokesman for the UN Relief and Works Agency told the BBC that Israel had been told 17 times that the school was housing displaced people, saying the attack caused 'universal shame."
Hey, Binyamin! You know this 'human shields' thing? 

Are the UN using children as human shields as well? I mean, the Jabaliya refugee camp is their baby.

And you know how you 'try to minimize civilian casualties?'

Try harder.

P.S. On the same day, a Gazan market was bombed. 17 people were killed.

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