MEPE

[HBendor]

Land for war
Posted by: "Jack L" yakovdov1@yahoo.com yakovdov1
Fri Oct 27, 2006 7:51 pm (PST)
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1371
<http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1371> October 26, 2006
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1371
<http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1371> October 26, 2006
Land for war

A great rebuke to Robert Fisk by Dan Gordon at the American Thinker
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5978> shreds his
absurd claims about the Lebanon war by the simple application of the
facts. But those who make such objectionable claims about Israel's
behaviour are, alas, quite impervious to the application of reason.
Sections of the media have constructed an utterly diabolical story about
Israel which mere facts can never shake, as Gordon illustrates by this
telling anecdote from the scene of an earlier and similar blood libel:

I was an eyewitness to a classic example of this in Jenin, in 2002.
Western journalists and United Nation envoys were in an uproar over an
alleged Israeli massacre of a thousand Palestinians. There were grisly,
supposed eyewitness, accounts of Israeli bulldozers shoveling hundreds
of corpses of helpless Palestinian refugees into mass graves. There were
stories of Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children in front of
their parents and then throwing their bodies into wells and sewage pits.
Comparisons were made to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to Nazi war
crimes and the term genocide was spoken with righteous indignation.
The truth turned out to be somewhat less Baroque. There was a battle not
a massacre. In that battle some fifty Palestinian combatants were
killed, as were twenty three Israeli soldiers. The battle was a
ferocious one and in the Arab press there were glowing tales of the
fifty Palestinian fighters who fell in glorious combat against the
Zionist enemy they valiantly slaughtered. But to the majority of Western
journalists the facts became a footnote on the inside pages, reported
weeks after the front page banner line headlines screamed about the
supposed massacre.

There was one journalist, Sheila McVicker of CNN, who was so openly
hostile in her attitudes toward Israel that an Israeli Army medical
officer, a gentle man who was head of pediatrics at Hadasa Hospital,
inquired quietly as to the source of her anger at Israel. He tried to
explain to her that Jenin was not the shelter of helpless refugees,
rather it was exactly what its residents proclaimed it to be: the
suicide bomber capital of the world. Hundreds of Israeli men, women and
children, almost all of them civilians, had been murdered by the suicide
bombers dispatched from Jenin. That is why a battle took place there.
After close to thirty people were blown to bits at a Passover dinner in
Israel, the Israeli military took action against those who dispatched
the suicide bombers, trained them, armed them and sent them out to
murder again and again.

`Maybe,' demanded Ms. McVicker, `You should ask yourself why
they became terrorists.'
`I do,' said the good doctor. `It's something I ask
myself all the time. Why would someone from Jenin choose to come to
Jerusalem or Hadera to commit suicide just so they could kill a few Jews
along the way? Why would they choose death over life?'

`I can sum it up for you,' said Ms. McVicker defiantly, `I
can sum it up in one word: occupation,' she said spitting the word
out, as if it left a foul taste in her mouth.

`But my dear, Ms. McVicker,' the good doctor said, `Jenin
hasn't been occupied for nine years. In nine years there has not
been the footprint of one Israeli soldier in Jenin. Jenin is ruled by
the United Nations and the PLO.'

Ms. McVicker did not reply. She turned on her heel as if she had been
spat upon and stormed off. How dare this man respond with facts? How
dare he contradict the narrative to which she was so firmly committed?

Now history is surely about to repeat itself once again. Israel's
occupation of Gaza ended with disengagement. The Palestinians have been
left alone to get on with constructing the civil society to furnish the
state that the world assumes they want so badly. They have not done so.
Instead, they are descending into the chaos and anarchy of civil war,
while equipping themselves with ever more fearsome rockets and other
weapons in order to attack Israel with ever greater ferocity. Moreover,
Iran is helpfully training them to become an army to wage war all the
more professionally upon Israel from the land it has vacated, just like
Hezbollah was used to attack it from Lebanon. Israel will have no option
but to go back into Gaza to try to protect its citizens from such
aggression. And how will the western media report this when it does so?
Undoubtedly by screaming once again about Israeli atrocities and war
crimes, just as they did over Jenin and Lebanon.

What has happened in Lebanon and Gaza dramatically exposes the utter
hollowness of the `occupation causes resistance' argument. In
both cases, the ending of occupation merely facilitated even greater
aggression. Instead of `land for peace', the real deal is land
for war. But when it comes to the reporting of the Middle East, the
western media can be relied upon never to allow the facts to get in the
way of a steaming prejudice.

A great rebuke to Robert Fisk by Dan Gordon at the American Thinker
<http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5978> shreds his
absurd claims about the Lebanon war by the simple application of the
facts. But those who make such objectionable claims about Israel's
behaviour are, alas, quite impervious to the application of reason.
Sections of the media have constructed an utterly diabolical story about
Israel which mere facts can never shake, as Gordon illustrates by this
telling anecdote from the scene of an earlier and similar blood libel:

I was an eyewitness to a classic example of this in Jenin, in 2002.
Western journalists and United Nation envoys were in an uproar over an
alleged Israeli massacre of a thousand Palestinians. There were grisly,
supposed eyewitness, accounts of Israeli bulldozers shoveling hundreds
of corpses of helpless Palestinian refugees into mass graves. There were
stories of Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian children in front of
their parents and then throwing their bodies into wells and sewage pits.
Comparisons were made to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, to Nazi war
crimes and the term genocide was spoken with righteous indignation.
The truth turned out to be somewhat less Baroque. There was a battle not
a massacre. In that battle some fifty Palestinian combatants were
killed, as were twenty three Israeli soldiers. The battle was a
ferocious one and in the Arab press there were glowing tales of the
fifty Palestinian fighters who fell in glorious combat against the
Zionist enemy they valiantly slaughtered. But to the majority of Western
journalists the facts became a footnote on the inside pages, reported
weeks after the front page banner line headlines screamed about the
supposed massacre.

There was one journalist, Sheila McVicker of CNN, who was so openly
hostile in her attitudes toward Israel that an Israeli Army medical
officer, a gentle man who was head of pediatrics at Hadasa Hospital,
inquired quietly as to the source of her anger at Israel. He tried to
explain to her that Jenin was not the shelter of helpless refugees,
rather it was exactly what its residents proclaimed it to be: the
suicide bomber capital of the world. Hundreds of Israeli men, women and
children, almost all of them civilians, had been murdered by the suicide
bombers dispatched from Jenin. That is why a battle took place there.
After close to thirty people were blown to bits at a Passover dinner in
Israel, the Israeli military took action against those who dispatched
the suicide bombers, trained them, armed them and sent them out to
murder again and again.

`Maybe,' demanded Ms. McVicker, `You should ask yourself why
they became terrorists.'
`I do,' said the good doctor. `It's something I ask
myself all the time. Why would someone from Jenin choose to come to
Jerusalem or Hadera to commit suicide just so they could kill a few Jews
along the way? Why would they choose death over life?'

`I can sum it up for you,' said Ms. McVicker defiantly, `I
can sum it up in one word: occupation,' she said spitting the word
out, as if it left a foul taste in her mouth.

`But my dear, Ms. McVicker,' the good doctor said, `Jenin
hasn't been occupied for nine years. In nine years there has not
been the footprint of one Israeli soldier in Jenin. Jenin is ruled by
the United Nations and the PLO.'

Ms. McVicker did not reply. She turned on her heel as if she had been
spat upon and stormed off. How dare this man respond with facts? How
dare he contradict the narrative to which she was so firmly committed?

Now history is surely about to repeat itself once again. Israel's
occupation of Gaza ended with disengagement. The Palestinians have been
left alone to get on with constructing the civil society to furnish the
state that the world assumes they want so badly. They have not done so.
Instead, they are descending into the chaos and anarchy of civil war,
while equipping themselves with ever more fearsome rockets and other
weapons in order to attack Israel with ever greater ferocity. Moreover,
Iran is helpfully training them to become an army to wage war all the
more professionally upon Israel from the land it has vacated, just like
Hezbollah was used to attack it from Lebanon. Israel will have no option
but to go back into Gaza to try to protect its citizens from such
aggression. And how will the western media report this when it does so?
Undoubtedly by screaming once again about Israeli atrocities and war
crimes, just as they did over Jenin and Lebanon.

What has happened in Lebanon and Gaza dramatically exposes the utter
hollowness of the `occupation causes resistance' argument. In
both cases, the ending of occupation merely facilitated even greater
aggression. Instead of `land for peace', the real deal is land
for war. But when it comes to the reporting of the Middle East, the
western media can be relied upon never to allow the facts to get in the
way of a steaming prejudice.

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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