Lies, hatred and the language of force

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Lies, hatred and the language of force
Kashif
10/12/00 at 19:55:50
assalaamu alaikum

This is an outstanding article which i think is ideal to forward to friends - especially non-muslim ones.

Kashif
Wa Salaam

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Lies, hatred and the language of force

Arab View

By Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent

13 October 2000

This is a story about lies, bias, hatred and death. It's about our inability – after more
than half a century – to understand the injustice of the Middle East. It's about a part
of the world where it seems quite natural, after repeatedly watching on television the
funeral of 11-year-old Sami Abu Jezar – who died two days after being shot through
the forehead by Israeli soldiers – for a crowd to kick two Israeli plainclothes agents
to death. It's about a nation that claims "purity of arms" but fires missiles at civilian
apartment blocks and then claims it is "restoring order". It's about people who are so
enraged by the killing of almost a hundred Palestinians that they try to blow up an
entire American warship.

It's as simple as that. When I walked into the local photocopy shop yesterday
afternoon, the boys there greeted me with ecstatic smiles. "Did you hear that an
American ship has been attacked?" one of them asked. "There are Americans dead."
All I saw around the room were smiles. In a corner, on a small television screen, an
Israeli Apache aircraft was firing a missile at Yasser Arafat's headquarters in Gaza.

Seven years ago, CNN showed us the Israeli prime minister shaking Yasser Arafat
by the hand, live on the White House lawn. Now, live from Gaza, we watch a pilot
carrying out an order from the Israeli prime minister to kill Arafat by bombing his
headquarters.

As usual last night, the television news broadcasts – those most obsequious and
deforming of information dispensers – were diverting our minds from the truth. They
did not ask why the Palestinians should have lynched two Israeli undercover men.
Instead, they asked why Palestinian police had not protected them. They did not ask
why a suicide bomber in a rubber boat should have bombed the USS Cole.

Instead, they asked who he was, who he worked for, and they interviewed Pentagon
officials who denounced "terrorism". Always the "who" or the "what"; never the
"why".

It is of course possible that Osama bin Laden, one of the more recent American hate
figures, could have inspired – by sermons rather than direct instruction – the attack
on the USS Cole. Bin Laden's family originally came from Yemen. And it was
Yemen that demanded the right earlier this week to fly arms direct to the Palestinians
of the occupied territories – provoked, it seems, by slow-motion footage of yet
another boy, a 12-year-old, dying on top of his father in Gaza after being shot by the
Israelis. Yet many of the attacks on Israeli occupation forces in Lebanon were
carried out by young men, unconnected with the corrupt Arab political ιlite but
enraged by the injustice of their lot. Maybe it was the same in Yemen.

When Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo agreement seven years ago, only a very few
asked how soon this raddled, flawed, hopeless "peace" would collapse. I thought it
would end in violence because the Palestinians were being forced by Americans and
Israelis to sign a peace that would give them neither a state nor an end to Jewish
settlements on Arab land, nor a capital in Arab east Jerusalem.

I wrote that Arafat had been turned from "super-terrorist" into a "super-statesman"
but could easily be turned into a "super-terrorist" again. And so it came to pass.
Yesterday, the Israeli spokesman Avi Pasner shared a BBC interview with me – and
called Arafat a "terrorist".

Alas, none of it was surprising – none save our continued inability to grasp what
happens when a whole society is pressure-cooked to the point of explosion. A
Pentagon official was saying last night the US government was trying to find out if the
attack on the USS Cole was "related" to "violence" in the Middle East. Come again?
Related? Violence? Who can doubt that the attempt to sink the Cole and all her 360
American crew was directed at a nation now held responsible for Israel's killing of
scores of Palestinian civilians? The United States – despite all the claptrap from
Madeleine Albright about "honest brokers" – is Israel's ally.

Ever since Arafat tried to leave the US ambassador's residence in Paris two weeks
ago, the Palestinians have placed this responsibility on America's shoulders. If the US
wants to go on supporting an ally that shoots down Palestinians in the streets of the
occupied territories, then the United States will be held to account. And will pay for
it.

No, of course this does not excuse the bloodthirsty killing of armed Israeli agents or
the desecration of the Tomb of Joseph in Nablus, or, indeed, the murder of Jewish
settlers. But the cruelty of the Palestinians can be explained by the cruelty of the
Israelis. The death toll among Palestinians now is almost exactly equal to that at
Qana in 1996 when Israeli gunners butchered 106 Lebanese civilians. We called it a
massacre. The Israelis said it was a mistake. True, it's scarcely 5 per cent of the
death toll at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps, when Israel's militia allies killed up
to 2,000 Palestinian civilians. We called that a massacre. Israel said this, too, was a
mistake. Like they called the death of two 12-year-old children and a
seven-year-old child and Sami Abu Jezar a mistake.

And yesterday – with no institutional memory to guide them – journalists were taking
at face value Israel's extraordinary claim that they fired "only at military targets", that
the civilian population of Gaza had been "told to evacuate" the areas to be bombed.
Do I not seem to remember how the Israelis said in 1982 that in Lebanon they "only
fired at military targets" – and left more than 17,000 civilians dead in two months?
Do I not recall that the Israelis ordered the villagers of Mansouri to "evacuate" before
they shelled it in 1996, then attacked their cars on the road and fired a missile into
the back of an ambulance, killing four children and three women – the missile made,
of course, by the Boeing company of America?

And was not the CIA supposed to be training the Palestinian policemen now being
derided by Mr Pasner as "terrorists" (his own country having personally vetted which
of them should carry arms)? And was not the United States the guarantor and broker
of the disastrous Oslo agreement? So is it really surprising that the Palestinians –
indeed, the Arabs – blame the United States for the tragedy unfolding in the Holy
Land?

And is it any less surprising that the Israelis have now turned on the man w ith whom
they thought they would conclude a peace that would turn "Palestine" into a
Bantustan? The man who was supposed to "control" the Palestinians, who was
supposed to lock up opponents of the "peace process" – whether they be peaceful
or violent – is not doing what he was told. He walked out of Camp David because it
was a surrender too far. So President Clinton blamed him for the conference's failure
– on Israeli television, of all places – and ordered Arafat not to declare a state. Or
else.

And now, when two US presidential contenders – Messrs Bush and Gore – try to
out-do each other in their love and loyalty for Israel, can America comprehend what
is happening?

I suppose it's the same old story. The Israelis only want peace. The unruly, riotous,
murderous Palestinians – totally to blame for 95 of their own deaths – understand
only violence.

That's what Israel's military spokesman said last night. Force, he said, "will be the
only language they understand". Which is about as near to a declaration of war as
you can get.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/World/Middle_East/2000-10/hatred131000.shtml
NS


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