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How silly of me to assume it was Israeli bombs causing all the damage in Gaza

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  • How silly of me to assume it was Israeli bombs causing all the damage in Gaza

    MARK STEEL

    Friday 1 August 2014

    It’s clearly just a batch of explosive toasters


    In recent years most of humanity has become more tolerant of groups who once seemed to be on the margins of society. But until now it’s still been acceptable to be offensive about one minority: the child murdering community.
    At last it seems the mood is changing, and finally we’re beginning to hear the child murderers’ point of view.

    For example one brave soul, prepared to speak out, is spokesman Uri Dromi, who explained on Radio 4 yesterday that although the Israeli government bombed a school that several children died in, the deaths are clearly the fault of the people who live in the areas being bombed.

    What a refreshing change from that tired old thinking that always blames murder on the murderer. Mister Drome, once a spokesman for the Israeli government, said the Israelis were “lured into a trap, now Hamas sheds crocodile tears about the dead”.

    If only more of us understood bombed schools in this way. We always rush to judge some poor kid in an American town who mows down his classmates, without even pausing to consider the dead kids probably tricked him into it, and now to make it worse their parents are all pretending to cry.

    Even more imaginative was Michael Oren, ex-Israeli ambassador to the US, on Channel 4 News. He explained that Hamas was to blame for all this death, because “toasters and refrigerators have been booby-trapped”.

    It goes to show you should never make up your mind too quickly. Many of us see pictures of buildings reduced to rubble with a bomb sticking out, and hastily conclude the bomb had something to do with the explosion. But look carefully and it becomes obvious it was caused by the silly sods blowing themselves up with a toaster.

    I bet if we went back to Hiroshima and checked what happened more thoroughly, we’d discover the blast was nothing to do with an atom bomb, and was caused by a booby-trapped kettle. I hope consumer programmes in Gaza cover this issue, to warn people of the dangers. The Gaza edition of Watchdog this week should start: “We’ve received several complaints from those of you who bought one of these toasters from Hamas, and were surprised when it caused your entire street to explode.”

    Benjamin Netanyahu spoke out for child murderers’ civil rights by informing us the Palestinians deliberately arrange the “telegenically dead” to be filmed, to attract sympathy. So it seems Hamas stroll round bomb sites, placing the prettiest corpses on view for film crews, otherwise we’d all think “it doesn’t matter that the Israelis killed that kid, he was an ugly little bastard anyway”.


    Other spokesmen have repeated this line, and maybe soon they’ll take it to the next stage, claiming that the Palestinians we see howling with anguish about their dead children have been trained at a special Hamas acting school. Directors yell, “One more rehearsal everyone, now as soon as we’ve blown up our toaster we want all the cast kneeling and sobbing, give it everything loves, everything, then we’ll go for a take.”

    As the bombing continues I expect we’ll hear more reasons why the Palestinians are to blame for being bombed. An Israeli minister will say, “These people in Gaza are always complaining that they live in a densely populated area, so we’re trying to help them out by reducing the population as much as we can to give them more space. But they’re still not happy. Some people are never satisfied.”


    The Israelis insist they give warnings before bombing somewhere, and in general we all forgive someone bombing a school as long as they let you know they’re doing it five minutes in advance. Given how crowded the area is, and the scale of the bombing, any warning might seem fairly useless unless it gives you instructions on how to fly or escape into another dimension like Doctor Who, but at least the intention is there.

    Now they’re calling up another 16,000 reservists, but if they don’t think they’re managing to do enough damage already, a better strategy might be to scrap their F16 bombers that clearly aren’t up to the job, and replace them with some booby-trapped toasters as apparently they’re more effective.

    In less enlightened times, those responsible for such murder would be snarled at in the street and their pictures displayed on newspapers under inflammatory headlines. But thankfully we’re growing more liberal, and can only regret that more thought wasn’t given to treating murderers kindly in the past.

    Poor Fred West, for example, instead of barely being given a chance to make his case, could have sat in televison studios saying, “Of course I regret the deaths of civilians. But you have to understand these people I murdered could be a bloody nuisance. I was lured into killing them, and I’m not even sure I did kill them until I’ve carried out my own investigation. Some of them kill themselves to get sympathy by booby-trapping their ironing boards, you know.”

    As times change, maybe Netanyahu and his spokesmen will become more forthright, and organise “Child Murderer Pride” in which child murderers can get together for a procession and carnival, where they can at last feel safe, and no longer feel looked down on for carrying out their basic human right to bomb a school to bits.

    READ MORE:
    THE REALITY OF LIFE UNDER ISRAEL'S IRON DOME
    IT'S NOT ANTI-SEMITIC TO CRITICISE ISRAEL
    THE ISRAELI PROPAGANDA MACHINE IS FINALLY STARTING TO MISFIRE
    The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.” Winston Churchill

  • #2
    Dans le même registre, il y a aussi la lettre ouverte adressée au peuple américain par le chanteur-compositeur britannique Brian Eno. À partir de l'image d'un palestinien portant le corps déchiqueté de son fils dans un sac en plastic, l'artiste questionne les citoyens américains sur le soutien inconditionnel de leur pays à Israël. La lettre a été d'abord publiée par David Byrne sur son site, puis relayée par un bon nombre de médias occidentaux.



    Voici quelques extraits traduits en français :

    L’intervention américaine

    « Comment se fait-il que l’Amérique poursuive encore son nettoyage ethnique à sens unique ? POURQUOI ? Je ne comprends pas son soutien aveugle de cet exercice unilatéral de nettoyage ethnique? POURQUOI ? Je déteste imaginer que c’est juste le pouvoir de l’AIPAC [Comité américain pour les Affaires publiques israéliennes] car si c’est le cas, alors votre gouvernement est fondamentalement corrompu. Mais je ne pense pas que ce soit la raison… »

    Le gouvernement américain qui n’écoute pas la raison

    « L’Amérique que je connais et que j’aime est compatissante, large d’esprit, créative, éclectique, tolérante et généreuse. Chacun d’entre vous symbolise ces choses pour moi. Mais que l’Amérique soutient cette horrible guerre colonialiste ? Je ne peux pas. Tout le monde n’est pas comme vous, alors comment se fait toutes ces voix ne sont pas entendues ? Que pensez vous que le monde entend lorsque le mot « Amérique » est prononcé ? Comme c’est moche lorsque le pays qui plus que tout autre clame ses racines et son identité dans les notions de liberté et de démocratie place son argent pour soutenir une théocratie raciste et violente.«

    Le racisme du gouvernement israélien

    Eno ne comprend pas que les Etats-Unis financent un gouvernement qui considère haut et fort que le mot « Arabe équivaut à vermine – un racisme de la vieille école qui a la même arrogance que celui utilisé par les bons vieux gars de la Louisiane. (…) C’est comme envoyer de l’argent au [Ku Klux] Klan « .

    L’image de l’Occident profite aux « mollah fous »

    « Qu’on le veuille ou non, aux yeux de la plupart des pays, l’Amérique représente « l’Occident ». C’est donc l’Occident qui est considéré comme l’appui de cette guerre. Et ce, malgré nos conversation de haute volée sur la morale et la démocratie. Je crains que toutes les réalisations civilisationnelles des Lumières et la culture occidentale en général soient discréditées – à la grande joie des mollahs fous – par cette hypocrisie flagrante. Cette guerre n’a aucune justification morale à ce que j’en sache – mais elle n’a même pas non plus de justification pragmatique. »

    Pourquoi cette lettre ?

    « Je suis désolé de vous ennuyer avec tout ça. Je sais que vous êtes occupés et – à des degrés divers – allergiques à la politique, mais tout ça va bien au-delà de la politique. Nous dilapidons le capital civilisationnel que nous avons construit au fil des générations. Aucune des questions de cette lettre n’était rhétorique. » Ce n’est d’ailleurs pas la première fois que Brian s’exprime sur le sujet.

    La note de Peter Schwartz

    Byrne a aussi publié une note de Peter Schwartz, un ami d’Eno qui confirme et tempère : « Ce qui est clair, c’est que personne n’a un niveau de morale élevé » puis continue en déclarant que « Israël a perdu son chemin et commet des horreurs pour sa propre survie (…) et les Arabes et les Perses perpétuent ce conflit en luttant avec la haine d’Israël. La haine est la seule chose qu’ils partagent. »


    Source : Sourdoreille.net

    L'original en anglais :

    GAZA AND THE LOSS OF CIVILIZATION

    by Brian Eno | July 28, 2014



    Dear All of You:

    I sense I'm breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can't keep quiet any more.

    Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He'd been shredded (the hospital's word) by an Israeli missile attack - apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are - hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.

    I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.

    Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won't sign up to it.

    What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But - for Christ's sake! - it's not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY? I just don't get it. I really hate to think its just the power of AIPAC… for if that's the case, then your government really is fundamentally corrupt. No, I don't think that's the reason… but I have no idea what it could be.

    The America I know and like is compassionate, broadminded, creative, eclectic, tolerant and generous. You, my close American friends, symbolise those things for me. But which America is backing this horrible one-sided colonialist war? I can't work it out: I know you're not the only people like you, so how come all those voices aren't heard or registered? How come it isn't your spirit that most of the world now thinks of when it hears the word 'America'? How bad does it look when the one country which more than any other grounds its identity in notions of Liberty and Democracy then goes and puts its money exactly where its mouth isn't and supports a ragingly racist theocracy?

    I was in Israel last year with Mary. Her sister works for UNWRA in Jerusalem. Showing us round were a Palestinian - Shadi, who is her sister's husband and a professional guide - and Oren Jacobovitch, an Israeli Jew, an ex-major from the IDF who left the service under a cloud for refusing to beat up Palestinians. Between the two of them we got to see some harrowing things - Palestinian houses hemmed in by wire mesh and boards to prevent settlers throwing shit and piss and used sanitary towels at the inhabitants; Palestinian kids on their way to school being beaten by Israeli kids with baseball bats to parental applause and laughter; a whole village evicted and living in caves while three settler families moved onto their land; an Israeli settlement on top of a hill diverting its sewage directly down onto Palestinian farmland below; The Wall; the checkpoints… and all the endless daily humiliations. I kept thinking, "Do Americans really condone this? Do they really think this is OK? Or do they just not know about it?".

    As for the Peace Process: Israel wants the Process but not the Peace. While 'the process' is going on the settlers continue grabbing land and building their settlements… and then when the Palestinians finally erupt with their pathetic fireworks they get hammered and shredded with state-of-the-art missiles and depleted uranium shells because Israel 'has a right to defend itself' ( whereas Palestine clearly doesn't). And the settler militias are always happy to lend a fist or rip up someone's olive grove while the army looks the other way. By the way, most of them are not ethnic Israelis - they're 'right of return' Jews from Russia and Ukraine and Moravia and South Africa and Brooklyn who came to Israel recently with the notion that they had an inviolable (God-given!) right to the land, and that 'Arab' equates with 'vermin' - straightforward old-school racism delivered with the same arrogant, shameless swagger that the good ole boys of Louisiana used to affect. That is the culture our taxes are defending. It's like sending money to the Klan.

    But beyond this, what really troubles me is the bigger picture. Like it or not, in the eyes of most of the world, America represents 'The West'. So it is The West that is seen as supporting this war, despite all our high-handed talk about morality and democracy. I fear that all the civilisational achievements of The Enlightenment and Western Culture are being discredited - to the great glee of the mad Mullahs - by this flagrant hypocrisy. The war has no moral justification that I can see - but it doesn't even have any pragmatic value either. It doesn't make Kissingerian 'Realpolitik' sense; it just makes us look bad.

    I'm sorry to burden you all with this. I know you're busy and in varying degrees allergic to politics, but this is beyond politics. It's us squandering the civilisational capital that we've built over generations. None of the questions in this letter are rhetorical: I really don't get it and I wish that I did.
    كلّ إناءٍ بما فيه يَنضَح

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