I watched BBC World News for a timed hour yesterday. In that time I saw:
Pro-Israeli (including US government) speakers – 17
Pro-Palestinian speakers – 2
Mentions of Hamas Rockets as reason for war – 37
Mentions of illegal Israeli settlements – 0
Mentions of Palestinians killed by Israel during “ceasefire” – 2
Mentions of Sderot – 12
Mentions Sderot used to be Palestinian – 0
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself.
The Interpal facebook group, of which I am a member, was sending out information on demonstrations and on relief aid to Gaza. Facebook yesterday closed down Interpal, with the following message:
The group “Interpal” has been removed because it violated our Terms of Use. Among other things, groups that are hateful, threatening, or obscene are not allowed. We also take down groups that attack an individual or group, or advertise a product or service. Continued misuse of Facebook’s features could result in your account being disabled.
Now I frequently pull up people commenting here if I feel they are being anti-Jewish or supporting terror, but I received all Interpal’s messages and saw nothing at all that could be characterised as “Hateful, threatening or obscene”, except in that they are labels which the powerful continually manage to apply to anyone opposing Israeli military aggression.
It is Facebook’s closing the Interpal group which might more correctly be characterised as hateful, threatening and obscene, in view of what is happening in Gaza.
I strongly recommend this interview with Dr Mads Gilbert as a corrective to the mainstream media.
There never is going to be a peace accord between Palestine and Israel. This has been going on sixty years now and the only solution to the situation has been Israel's only true goal. That is to hand the Palestinians their extinction papers! It is Israel's own version of "The Final Solution". If the Zionist leaders of Israel thought they could get away with using some of the stockpile of Vx nerve agent they have, they would gas Gaza in a god damn heartbeat! The Zionist's have ruined Israel for good, but they don't care because even a Jew who is a non-Zionist Jew is not even a human being to the Zionists!
Professor James Petras recently wrote an important article: The Politics of An Israeli Extermination Campaign: Backers, Apologists and Arms Suppliers
The whole article is available among other places at http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va…
He concludes his article with pertinent observations and suggestions for action.
From the moment that the Israeli Government decided it would destroy the newly elected Hamas government and punish the democratic electorate of Gaza with starvation and murder, the entire Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US, including the PMAJO, pulled all stops in implementing the Israeli policy. The PMAJO encompasses the fifty-two Jewish organizations with the largest membership, with the greatest financial clout and the most influential backers. The most prominent lobbyist within the PMAJO is AIPAC, which has over 100,000 members and 150 full-time operatives in Washington actively pressuring the US Congress, the White House and all administrative agencies whose policies may relate to the interests of the State of Israel. However Israeli political extends far beyond its non-governmental agencies. Over two score legislators in the Congress and over a dozen senators are committed Zionists who automatically back Israel's policies and push for US funding and armaments for its military machine. Top officials in key administrative positions, in Treasury, Commerce and the National Security Council, senior functionaries in the Pentagon and top advisers on Middle East affairs are also life-long, fanatically committed Zionists, who consistently and unreservedly back the policies of the State of Israel.
Equally important, the majority of the largest film, print and electronic media are owned or deeply influenced by Jewish-Zionist media moguls who are committed to slanting the 'news' in favor of Israel. The composition and influence of the ZPC is central to understanding three main characteristics of Israel's power: (1) Israel can commit what leading United Nations and international human rights experts have defined as 'crimes against humanity' with total impunity; (2) Israel can secure an unlimited supply of the most technologically advanced and destructive weapons and use them without limit on a civilian population in violation of even US Congressional restrictions and (3) scores of almost unanimous United Nations condemnations of the construction of genocidal apartheid barriers against a native population, starvation embargoes and the current extermination campaign in Gaza are always vetoed by the US representative.
Many critics of Israel's genocide in Gaza also condemn what they call 'the complicity' of Washington or 'the United States' without clearly identifying the actual socio-political forces influencing policy-makers or the 'dual' political loyalties and identities of the 'American' politicians who have long-standing and deep allegiances to Israel. As a consequence, most critics fail to counter, protest or even identify the ideology and politics of the organized power configurations which define US complicity with Israel, who intimidate potential critics, who write and mouth the pro-Israel editorials in the mass media and who filter out any criticism, any truth… even when Israel engages in sustained bloody extermination campaigns.
The ZPC and the Israeli War of Extermination in Gaza
The ZPC played a major role in all stages of Israel's extermination campaign against Gaza including a sustained propaganda effort. The ZPC orchestrated a massive successful campaign through the extensive network of American mass media, which it controls and influences. It fabricated an image of the Hamas administration in Gaza as a terrorist organization, which allegedly seized power through violence ?" totally denying its rise to power through internationally supervised, democratic elections and its defense of its electoral mandate against a US-Israeli backed PLO military takeover. The entire Zionist Jewish leadership backed Israel's land grabs, its ghetto wall around Palestinians, the hundreds of road blocks, the Jewish settlers violently taking over Palestinian homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and the criminal, genocidal Israeli economic embargo on Gaza designed to systematically starve the Palestinians into submission. Throughout the two years of this Israeli extermination campaign, American Zionists played a major role in leading the servile US government at home and abroad in backing each totalitarian measure: The vast majority of local synagogues became bully-pulpits defending the starvation and degradation of 1.5 million Palestinian refugees in Gaza caged on all sides by deadly force and the 'walling off' into economically and socially devastating cantons of the 4.5 million West Bank Palestinian population under foreign occupation. The US Congress shamelessly followed the Zionist lead, backing every single criminal measure taken by the State of Israel and approving dozens of resolutions, which in most cases were entirely written by AIPAC lobbyists acting as unregistered agents of the Israeli government (contrary to US federal statute, which requires foreign agents and lobbyists to be registered as such). Israel's demands for the most up-to-date US warplanes, including F-16s, Apache helicopter gun ships, and 1,000 pound bombs were secured by dint of effort of the AIPAC lobbyists and their clients in the US Congress. In other words, the American ZPC created the ideological cover and military instruments for Israel's 'total war' against the defenseless Palestinian population. Equally important, prominent Zionist leaders in the US Congress and members of the foreign policy establishment blocked or vetoed any international criticism of Israel ?" securing its impunity and immunity from any of the Congressional sanctions usually enacted against criminal states. In other words, Israeli policy makers operated with the knowledge that there would be no negative economic, diplomatic and military repercussions to their launching the planned Gaza extermination campaign because they knew, in advance, that 'their people' were in total control of US Middle East policy to the extent of actually repeating verbatim each and every propaganda lie in defense of Israel's total war against the entire population of Gaza.
In Defense of Israel's War of Extermination
The Zionist-controlled US print media, in particular the New York Times and the Washington Post, systematically fabricated an account that fit perfectly with Israel's official line defending its massive assault on Gaza: Omitting any historical account of the hundreds of Israeli armed incursions and 'targeted' assassinations of Palestinian leaders and officials (even in their own homes) which repeatedly violated the 'cease fire' agreed by Hamas and provoked its retaliation in self-defense of its people; omitting the years of an Israeli enforced starvation embargo of food and essentials that threatened the lives of 1.5 million Palestinians and led to the desperate efforts of the elected Hamas leadership to secure supplies for the people's survival via tunnels across the Egyptian border and through missile attacks against Israel to pressure the Jewish state to negotiate an end of the criminal blockade.
The Conference of President of the Major American Jewish Organizations, and the vast majority of Jewish communal groups and congregations, gave enthusiastic and unanimous support to Israel's total war, its extermination campaign against the captive Palestinian population of Gaza. Even as images and reports of the massive destruction, killing and wounding of over 2,500 defenseless Palestinians filtered in the mass media, not a single major Jewish organization broke ranks; only individuals and small groups protested. All the 'Majors' persisted in the politics of the Big Lie: the destruction of hospitals, mosques, universities, roads, apartments, pharmacies and fishing ports were all labeled 'Hamas targets'. The systematic all-out assault by uncontested helicopter gunships against 1.5 millions civilians was erased by tendentious accounts of Hamas' homemade missiles falling ineffectively near Israeli towns.
A close reading of the most important propaganda organ of the PMAJO, The Daily Alert (TDA), during the first 5 days of Israel's assault, reveals the propaganda tack taken by the leadership of the pro-Israel power configuration. TDA systematically worked to achieve the following:
1.
Exaggerate the threats to Israel by the Palestinian missiles from Gaza, citing 4 Israeli deaths, while omitting any mention of the 2,500 Palestinian dead and wounded and the total destruction of their economy and living conditions (without safe water, electricity, food, cooking fuel, medicine and heat in the winter).
2.
Promote Israel's military assault as 'defensive', directed at eliminating Hamas rocket attacks while omitting mention of Israel's clearly stated purpose of destroying all civil organizations, social welfare agencies, educational facilities, medical clinics and public security institutions connected in any way with the elected Hamas government and any auxiliary agencies.
3.
Cite select statement from Israel's allies and clients (Washington, the US media, Germany and the UK) blaming Hamas for the conflict without mentioning the vast majority of countries in the United Nations General Assembly condemning Israel's brutality.
4.
Reproduce Israeli slanders against any and all international human rights leaders and organizations that condemn the Jewish state's policy of genocide against the native Palestinians. In this regard, TDA is the foremost 'genocide denier' in the United States and, perhaps outside of Israel, in the world.
5.
Repeatedly cite Israeli political and military leaders' claims of acting 'with restraint', 'safeguarding civilians', and 'targeting military objectives', even in the face of reports and images of mass civilian destruction and loss of life documented in the vast majority of (non-US) Western media.
6.
Defend every Israeli bombing mission, every day, every hour, of every building, every home, and every economic, religious and educational institution in Gaza as 'defensive' or a 'reprisal', all the while quoting some of the most notorious, unconditional, perennial apologists of Israeli violence as if they were unbiased intellectuals, including Benny 'Nuke Tehran' Morris, Marty Peretz and Amos Oz.
7.
The Daily Alert quotes US writers, journalists and editors who praise and defend Israel's 'total war' without identifying their long-standing affiliation and identification with Zionist organizations, giving the false image of a wide spectrum of opinion behind the assault. Never has even the most moderate Jewish or Gentile critic of Israel's massive extermination campaign appeared in any issues of The Daily Alert.
The principle American Jewish organizations have bombarded the US Congress, influencing, intimidating and purchasing the craven so-called 'representatives' of the American people, the media and public notables with lies in defense of Israel's total war to exterminate a people. Their public, brazen, open complicity in genocide can be considered crime against humanity: The willful promotion of acts of a state designed to destroy an entire people.
And yet these willing accomplices, these 'willing executioners' of state mass murder go uncontested within the US political class. One of their leading mouthpieces in the incoming Obama Administration, Chief Presidential Adviser David Axelrod, even cites an Obama campaign speech defending Israeli assaults on the people of Gaza.
Israel arrogantly repudiates all calls to end this mass murder, because Israel knows that 'its people' are still in control of US policy toward the Middle East and will use their power in the new president's administration to block any condemnation of this crime.
To date the entire human rights and anti-war movements have failed to even mention, let along challenge, the most powerful propaganda and political organizations, which influence US policy and manipulate the mass media in favor of Israel's extermination campaign. They will play no restraining role on Israel's totalitarian policies as long as its principle US backers are free to lie, manipulate and defend each and every crime.
There is little hope for an independent US Congressional policy as long as Israel's war of extermination in Gaza can be defended by the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (and Zionist zealot) Congressman Howard Berman in the following terms: "Israel has a right, indeed a duty, to defend itself in response to the hundreds of rockets and mortars fired from Gaza over the past week. No government in world would sit by and allow its citizens to be subjected to this kind of indiscriminate bombardment. The loss of innocent life is a terribly tragedy and the blame for that tragedy lies with Hamas." Thus Congressman Berman cynically omits the 2 years of Israel's embargo, the daily 'targeted' assassinations of Palestinians, the 'targeted' missile attacks against civilians, the land, sea and air blockades and the blatant 'targeted' destruction of the infrastructure of Gaza. No government, indeed a democratically elected Islamist government, can stand by while its people are starved and murdered into submission. But according to the respected Congressmen Bermans of the world, only the lives of Jews matter, not the growing thousands of murdered, dismembered and mutilated citizens of Gaza ?" they do not count as people!
What is to be Done
Israel's crimes against humanity demand a public response: social action, which will force it to cease and desist from its campaign to exterminate the people of Gaza. Because the Jewish state has assaulted a vast array of Palestinian social institutions, which resonate with those in our own society, we can and should mobilize them to condemn and boycott their counterparts in Israel:
1.
We should urge the entire academic community to denounce Israel's bombardment of the Islamic University of Gaza and the total destruction of all of its science facilities. An organized boycott of Israeli universities and all academic exchanges, especially scientific, should become university policy throughout the country. Special attention should be paid to the 450 US university presidents, who in the recent past, denounced a call by British academics for a boycott and who remain silent and complicit in the face of Israel's total physical annihilation of all ten faculties for 20,000 Palestinian university students.
2.
All American health workers, doctors, nurses, technicians, should organize and denounce Israel's medical embargo against the 1.5 million Palestinians crowded into the Gaza Strip. They must condemn Israel's bombardment of Gaza's Children's Hospital, the neighborhood pharmacies and the attacks on any transport of those critically wounded Palestinian victims of its aerial and missile attacks. Medical personnel should raise the fundamental ethical issues regarding the collaboration of US medical personnel and programs with the Jewish State's 'total war' policies of extermination.
3.
All citizens should demand the end of all US military aid to Israel, especially F-16 fighter planes, Apache attack helicopters, missiles, 1000 pound 'bunker buster' bombs used by the Israeli armed forces on the civilian infrastructure of Gaza and the murder and maiming of over 2,500 Palestinians, civilians, civil servants, police and national militia. In pursuit of a cutoff of US military aid to Israel, every effort should be made to target and denounce the most forceful, aggressive and successful Zionist advocates and lobbyists who influence the elected members of the US Congress and White House on foreign military aid budgets. No progress in ending US military aid for Israel's ethnic cleansing will succeed unless the peace movement and others appalled by Israel's mass murder tackles the Zionist lobby head on. This includes boycotts, rebuttals and demonstrations against the AIPAC, the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the other 50 leading American Jewish organizations, which initiate and secure US governmental endorsement of Israel's extermination policies.
4.
US religious institutions should forcefully denounce Israel's crimes against humanity, including its demolition of 5 mosques, uniting all faiths (Christian, Moslem, Buddhist) and especially reaching out to the tiny minority of rabbis and observant Jews willing to forthrightly denounce the totalitarian practices of the Israeli state.
5.
Port and long shore workers, sailors and other maritime workers and officials should boycott the handling of all trade with Israel and denounce its Navy's violent illegal assault, in international waters, of civilian fishing boats and vessels carrying humanitarian aid to Gaza. No ships carrying Israeli products should be loaded or unloaded as long as Israel maintains its criminal military blockade of the port facilities of Gaza.
6.
Tens of millions of US citizens subject to the one-sided pro-Israel bias of the electronic and print media, the lop-sided presentations of Zionist 'op-ed' writers, 'news' reports and the self-styled Middle East experts, should demand equal time, coverage and reportage for non-Zionist specialists, analysts and commentators. We should demand the end of euphemisms and fabrications, which convert victims into aggressors and exterminators into victims.
7.
We should wage a battle of ideas everywhere (in every public forum) against the efforts by the Zionist Power Configuration to monopolize discussion over the Israeli policy of genocide, to censor, intimidate and slander critics of Israeli apartheid ?" as UN General Assembly President Manuel d'Escoto so aptly calls Israel's Ghetto Wall surrounding Palestinian villages. The outpouring of public protest over Israel's war of extermination is an enormous step forward in countering the Zionist monopoly of the mass media and encouraging the tens of millions of Americans who clearly recognize and privately despise Israel's crimes against humanity and resent the local Zionist elite's thuggery against those who speak out. Mass pressure on elected representative may sway some to reconsider their abject servility to their Zionist 'contributors' and their 'Israel First' Congressional colleagues.
8.
A patriotic nationwide campaign should demand that the Israel lobby, especially AIPAC, come clean and register as a foreign agent of the State of Israel. This might undermine the Lobby's appeal to American Jews, reduce its influence over Congress and open up judicial processes and investigations over its abuse of tax-exemptions, money-laundering and lead to revelations over its treasonous procurement of confidential US state documents for a foreign power. There is a powerful political and legal basis for such a denial of the 'Lobby's' tax-exempt status and legality, apart from the transparent and overwhelming evidence that all Zionist organizations act as transmission belts for Israeli state policies: In the early 1950's up to 1963, the forerunner of AIPAC was obligated to register as a foreign agent of the State of Israel. More recently, an Israeli prosecutor presented evidence that the Israeli-Jewish Agency and its US counterparts were laundering billions of dollars especially for the funding of Israeli colonial settlements on occupied Palestinian land, condemned as illegal under international law. Congressional hearings, law suits and further published research would reveal the role of the Lobby as a Fifth Column for the State of Israel against the interest of the people of the United States.
Until we neutralize the pervasive power of the Zionist Power Configuration in all of its manifestations ?" in American public and civic life ?" and its deep penetration of American legislative and executive offices, we will fall short of preventing Israel from receiving the arms, funding and political backing to sustain its wars of ethnic extermination.
When told that the great majority of the world's people are sickened and incensed by Israel's mass murder of the citizens of Gaza, we can easily imagine the contemptuous dismissal by Israel's top leaders, paraphrasing Joseph Stalin: How many bombers, missiles, fighter planes and powerful lobbies do they (the outraged people of the world) have?
Hi Craig
Great work. You are 100% on the money. Watch out for people sticking massive comments on here that are not relevant to your points since they are only trying to detract from your arguments. It would be reasonable to edit them.
No one seems to ask why is it only a few select nations like America / Israel / England (to name a few) are allowed to freely move about this world , slaughter and treat humans as other "evil empires" have. Yet, to this very minute you are given immunity (in your own minds) simply because rich men like what your leaders accomplish for them.
Israel is only protecting itself from terrorists muslims firing rockets into Israel. by reading the article and follow up posts, i get the impression that everybody thinks it would be OK for mexicans to fire rockets inti USA southern cities !!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-t7PmonBEA&featur…
goldieshouse.piczo.com
I just caught the last five minutes of BBC World's "World Have Your Say", which consisted of, as far as I could see, four guests – a physician in Jerusalem ("we will fire back until Hamas stops firing its rockets"), an American ("I believe Hamas are terrorists"), an Israeli in London ("The Palestinians should blame Hamas") and a Palestinian ("The Palestinians should have given back some rights"). The viewers' emails came thick and fast and were dutifully read out as the show closed – from Jamaica, from Kenya, from Boston, and all of them defended Israle's "right to self defence". I fear we are approaching the Fallujah phase of the operation.
to "rich at January 8, 2009 3:19 PM"
If the US had tanks at every intersection in Mexico, had taken all the rivers, and closed all borders, and there would be "US-only country clubs 1 million hectar at a time, built without your permission, and against international law"
…….. YOU CAN BET YOUR ARSE, that the mexicans would be launching rockets !!! (and sticking cactus thorns in the toilet rolls they manufacture !)
@cardinal.I dont know wether Craig belives in the authenticity of the Protocols but I do,ever since I had a chance to read about 30 yeaars ago.OK, forget the authenticity,just look at the world now and go back into history and things become clearer.
Jews are pressuring the govt to make sure anything pro humanitirian is shutdown. Mr Murray I salute your courage.
An interesting discussion. Jennifer Loewenstein's article is a beauty.
Yes, of course the western mass media, taken as a whole, is shockingly biased towards Israel. And yes, Israeli apologists love to claim the opposite. It makes it easier for them to justify shouting down their opponents.
I believe something needs to be said, which is often not said by those who are critical of Israel but keen not be be labelled 'anti-Semitic'.
It is generally accepted that Zionism – both an ideology and a movement – gave birth to the State of Israel. But what gave rise to Zionism?
We must be able to discuss Zionism's broader historical and cultural context or we are utterly hamstrung in understanding this extraordinary and dangerous phenomenon.
Critical discusssion of Judaism – in whole or in part – must be permissible for a full discussion of Zionism, Palestine etc. The very fact that this point needs to be articulated (the fact it is not too obvious to say) is a sign of how far the ideological terrain has been skewed in mainstream western discourse.
I touch on this topic in 'Speaking our Way out of Hell' and give some links for further reading. IMO the work of Israel Shamir is especially useful in helping to level the ideological playing field.
Links:
Speaking our Way out of Hell
http://sydwalker.info/blog/2009/01/07/speaking-ou…
Israel Shamir
http://www.israelshamir.net/
Barrak Obama is a coward – albeit an elected coward – but a coward none-the-less. The situation in Gaza proves this (as it proves the cowardice of many of our worlds leaders).
I pity the Israeli's. They might gain territory, more American support and dollars, they may even manage to grab more sympathy from those who can only see Israeli's as victims.
It seems these things come at the expense of Israeli humanity. Nothing is worth the cost of losing ones humanity. For that I pity these pathetic barbarians!
Peaceful: Craig has made it clear that he does not believe the Protocols to be authentic, and does not believe in a global Jewish conspiracy.
Pro-Western bias, anti-Muslim bias, pro-capital bias, lobbyists consisting of subsets of Jews, Christians and the arms industry, a slick Israeli PR campaign, and the strategic desirability of an ally within bombing range of Mid East oil are sufficient to explain US policy towards Israel. Some of these biases are weaker amongst Europeans, but they also don't want to go against the US. There is no need to infer a vast hidden conspiracy.
Add holocaust guilt to my above list, which has been ruthlessly exploited by Israel's jingoist supporters.
Syd: until WW2, the majority Jewish religious opinion was that a mass return to the Promised Land before the coming of the Jewish Messiah was against God's will. That is still the opinion of some ultra-orthodox sects, and despite significant Israeli enticements most Jews today have not chosen to emigrate to Israel.
Like all religions, Judaism is highly diverse, and individual Jews, being human, will tend to select the bits they like and ignore the bits they don't, reinterpreting their religion to fit into their preconceived biases.
Israel never observed the cease-fire to begin with. From the beginning, it announced a "special security zone" within the Gaza Strip and announced that Palestinians who enter this zone will be fired upon. In other words, Israel announced its intention that Israeli soldiers would shoot at farmers and other individuals attempting to reach their own land in direct violation of not only the cease-fire but international law.
Despite shooting incidents, including ones resulting in Palestinians getting injured, Hamas still held to the cease-fire from the time it went into effect on June 19 until Israel effectively ended the truce on November 4 by launching an airstrike into Gaza that killed five and injured several others.
Israel's violation of the cease-fire predictably resulted in retaliation from militants in Gaza who fired rockets into Israel in response. The increased barrage of rocket fire at the end of December is being used as justification for the continued Israeli bombardment, but is a direct response to the Israeli attacks.
The Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated pieces of property in the world. The presence of militants within a civilian population does not, under international law, deprive that population of their protected status, and hence any assault upon that population under the guise of targeting militants is, in fact, a war crime.
@Humanitarian,Thanks for clearing.Indeed,I was repying to cardinal's allegations.I believe Craig has to follow some "lines" of lournalism and can not really say much about the Protocol. See who is pressing for one war after another?Who is pressing for NWO? Refer to Henry Kissingers fresh comments.Who controls major media and finances?
People like Mr Murray and Mr,Galloway have to believe in official tales of Holocaust,911 to continue what they are doing.
The comments on this site illuminate the many and varied reasons that England, the country of my birth and family, is today little more that a powerless, unimportant little island.
London, Manchester, and on simply Muslim slums filled with lunatic fanatics.
And enough of the formerly "great" English
to write volumes of hateful drivel.
"England … little island"
FAIL.
Dumbass.
Why is there so much criticsm of Israel for bombing Gaza and destroying rocket installations when there is none of Britain or germany or Japan for the devastation their bombing raids casued on civilian populations during the second world war?
Mentions of illegal Israeli settlements – 0 Which ones? In Gaza (nil?) In Israel?
Mentions Sderot used to be Palestinian – 0 (and when was Sderot ever meant to be Palestinian?)
You also forgot:
Hostage taking of Gilad Shalit a War Crime – 0
Firing unguided rockets into population centres with the purpose of killing civilians a War Crime – 0
Using civilians as cover from which to launch rockets and motars a War Crime (because, according to the Geneva Conventions, it puts civilians in the firing line) – 0