Blitz on Gaza – Readjust your sense of reality

THE WESTERN MAINSTREAM MEDIA, reflecting Establishment political thinking, regurgitates the view that the killing of three Jewish teenagers provoked the onslaught on Gaza. The more likely reason is the recent announcement of a rapprochement between Palestinian forces Hamas and Fatah, a move that angered the Israeli Government, intelligence services and occupation forces.

A ‘ceasefire proposal’ reported on Tuesday 15 July was rejected by Hamas, who hadn’t been sounded out about it although Israel had.

According to the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz , the idea for the Egyptian-sponsored ‘ceasefire proposal’ was actually hatched in Washington, the messenger boy was Gulf War co-architect Tony Blair, and the terms were drafted by Israel.

In the 1991 comic Ceasefire, satirising the media presentation of the 1991 Iraq War, Angela Martin cut to the chase.

In Readjust Your Sense of Reality she intoned above the image of a woman whose head had been replaced by a TV set screening a skull while, behind her, missiles flew and blast clouds billowed from bombed buildings.

Underpinning the Western news coverage of the current Zionist onslaught against the Palestinian people of Gaza is the imperative that we viewers, readers and listeners readjust our reality to absorb (and by extension accept) the Zionist narrative for the latest bombardment of Gaza and the wider causes of the conflict in Palestine.

At the time of writing, more than 600 Palestinians – mostly defenceless elderly people, women and children – have been killed and 3,700 wounded. Israel has lost fewer than 30 soldiers from its invasion force,

Holding the Zionist and Western narrative together is the propagation of the myth that the Palestinians, represented by Hamas, are the aggressors; that Israel only acts in self-defence; and the greatest myth portrays the conflict as an equal battle between similarly-armed foes on a par with each other.

Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst, in an investigation titled Israel’s Media Strategy: What Lies Beneath, asks:

"Do you wonder why there are many questions left unanswered regarding the Israeli escalation in Gaza? Why the questions are so meek, the responses so murky, the phrases come in cliches and soundbites you've heard before? Do you feel watching certain interviews is an assault on your intelligence?

"Do you wonder why official Israeli spokespersons sound so calm, smiley and kind when their popular base sounds so angry, so aggressive, and so racist? How they are likely to say something like, 'Thank you, it's nice to be with you', even after being grilled by a probing, frustrated anchor. Why, when asked about the expansion of illegal settlements, Israeli spokespersons speak of the need for a peace settlement, and when asked about bombing civilians, they speak of a better future for all children, Israeli and Palestinian?

“This is all part of a well-thought, well-orchestrated media strategy to mystify, mislead and even misrepresent the reality. And much of it can be found in The Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary.”

He says Tel Aviv’s media offensive was developed five years ago “when the US-based ‘The Israel Project’ asked a Zionist US Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, to prepare a new, updated media guide for “leaders who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.

Marwan Bishara explains:

“The project builds on some of the best examples of Israeli leaders’ own success at mystification to devise a strategy that neutralises Israel’s critics and promotes and improves its media standing.

“It’s a step-by-step guide that underlines ‘the words that work’ and the ‘words that don’t work’ when speaking to Westerners. Like any marketing or PR campaign, much of the suggested code words, phrases and soundbites are based on polls.

“The report came after Israel’s 2008 Gaza war and following US President Barack Obama’s denunciation of Israeli settlements and his overtures towards Iran. It was prepared for internal use only and kept secret until it was finally leaked in the autumn of 2009.”

How this strategy dovetails with the present military campaign in Gaza shows in examples of how the media reports events.

In an editorial comment on 14 July, the Belfast morning paper The Irish News supported the UN’s call for a ceasefire between the “Palestinians and Israel” to be reinstated as the situation deteriorated.

The paper went on to say “what STARTED [my emphasis] with the MURDERS [my emphasis] of three Jewish teenagers and then that of a young Palestinian has escalated where air strikes are causing many casualties among people living in the Gaza area and scores of home-made rockets being fired indiscriminately in the other direction”.

Nowhere have I read, seen or heard in the mainstream media any of the deaths of Palestinians in Gaza described as “murder”.

The Irish Times, on the day after the bodies of the three Israeli teenagers were found, published photographs of the dead youths and carried commentary from various Israeli spokespersons including Government Minister Yisrael Katz and Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein.

Katz called for the destruction of the Hamas “infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza” while Edelstein demanded “an uncompromising war” against “terror” in general and Hamas in particular. (It has yet to be conclusively proved that Hamas was actually responsible for the teenagers’ abduction and murder.)

It is clear from Katz’s subsequent comment “it is time for the Palestinians to understand that Hamas will lead them to destruction” that for him the defenceless population of Gaza should suffer the indiscriminate shelling and aerial bombing of the best-equipped war machine in the Middle East.

It is also clear that the ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ (which refers to the Dahiya neighbourhood in Beirut that Israel purposely decimated in its 2006 assault on Lebanon) is Israel’s preferred method of warfare. Under this doctrine, the Israeli Army deploys overwhelmingly disproportionate firepower against the civilian infrastructure to restore Israel’s deterrence and turn the local population against its enemy.

It took the Palestinian Ambassador to Ireland, Ahmad Abdelrazak, to challenge the 2 July Irish Times editorial “Cycle of Violence”.

He took issue with how the ongoing violence meted out to Palestinians in Gaza or in the West Bank is largely ignored, especially the “two weeks of harsh collective punishment imposed on the entire Palestinian population as the Israeli Army searched for the three teenagers.

“Nine Palestinians were killed, two died of heart attack when the army raided their houses, tens were injured, many were orphaned, 640 were arrested and families saw their homes demolished by the Israeli Army.”

The subsequent coverage of the blitzkrieg against the people of Gaza has, by and large, set a threshold of justification for the slaughter that has occurred.

The framework is quite simple: Israeli air strikes are a “response” (Belfast Newsletter) to Hamas attacks; Israel will “expand operations” (Irish Times) after kidnap killings.

Again what is left out of the commentary is that the Israeli army, navy and air force are, to all intents and purposes, an adjunct of the United States military.

It is armed and funded by the United States and operationally tied into the American military strategy whereby the most modern and sophisticated weapons systems in the world are battle-tested by Israel.

According to the Electronic Intifada news website, DIME (Dense Inert Metal Explosives) munitions were developed by the US Air Force in 2006 and have since been tested repeatedly on the people of Gaza, who have long served as involuntary human lab rats for Israel’s weapons industry.

DIME bombs contain tungsten, a cancer-causing metal that helps to produce incredibly destructive blasts which slice through flesh and bone, often decapitating the lower limbs of people within the blast radius.

By comparison, the weapons Hamas have are unsophisticated and ineffective.

An Irish News editorial talked of Hamas firing rockets “indiscriminately”. So how does the Irish News editorial writer view Israel’s hi-tech, precision bombing of hospitals, disability centres, schools, homes, mosques, water and sewage plants, electricity generating facilities and fishing boats? And children clearly playing soccer on a beach.

Below: Three of the four Palestinian children (ages 9 to 11) playing football on a Gaza beach killed by an Israeli shell seen fleeing a first explosion only to die in a second strike