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=== News Update ===
Western media parrots Israeli narrative on Beit Hanoun Massacre
Khalid Amayreh, thepeoplesvoice.org
12 November, 2006 - Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem
On Wednesday, 8 November, the Israeli army committed another grisly
massacre in the Gaza Strip, killing and maiming scores of innocent
civilians, mostly sleeping women and children.
The new massacre is added to a long list of Israeli crimes against
innocent Palestinians whose only "crime" is their enduring determination
to rid themselves of decades of a demonic and dehumanizing Nazi-like
military occupation that seeks to annihilate and expel them from their
ancestral motherland.
Following the carnage, and as they usually behave in such circumstances,
Israeli leaders from the prime minister downward switched into the
damage-control mode, telling western news agencies and TV networks that
they "regretted" and were "saddened" by the death of innocent civilians.
Ehud Olmert, who just a few months ago was quoted as saying rather
brazenly that "Jewish lives are more important" was quoted ad nauseam,
nearly by every major western media outlet, that the killing was the
result of a "technical error" and that some 'errant artillery shells"
caused the bloodbath in Beit Hanoun.
Interestingly, nearly none of these news media, "the voices of the free
world, " bothered to ask or even wonder why "mistakes" and "technical
errors" and "errant artillery shells" are invoked whenever Palestinian
(and Lebanese) children and women are killed in the streets of their
neighborhoods, while on vacation along the Gaza beach, while fleeing
bombardments, as in Mirwaheen in southern Lebanon, or, indeed, while
sleeping in their beds as were the latest victims of Israeli savagery.
Unfortunately, most western reactions to the massacre didn’t go beyond
the usual platitudes and routine statements such as calling on both
sides to show restraint.
Here are some examples, which show the extreme flaccidity with which the
West treats Israeli criminality.
A statement issued by the White House on 9 November "regretted the
deaths and urged both sides to show restraint." Another wantonly
depraved statement came from the outgoing US ambassador to the UN, John
Bolton, who had the chutzpa to blame the killings in Beit Hanoun on
Hamas’s refusal to recognize Israel. You see the moral depravity of
these people, the brutal ugliness of their mentality!
Bolton on Saturday, 11 November, vetoed a draft UNSC resolution that
would have created a UN mechanism to provide protection of Palestinian
civilians from repeated Israeli attacks.
Even the conceivably more civilized European Union, while denouncing the
massacre as a "profoundly shocking event," had to dutifully remind us
that "Israel had the right to defend itself," thus giving the
pornographically mendacious impression that nuclear Israel, not the
nearly decimated Palestinians, was being under attack. Well, when will
EU ever say that the Palestinians, too, are human and have the right to
defend themselves? Probably when kosher pigs fly?
Similarly generally weak statements were issued by European officials,
such as British Foreign Office Secretary Margaret Beckett who was quoted
as saying that "it is hard to see what this action was meant to achieve
and how it can be justified. Israel must respect its obligations to
avoid harming civilians."
Well, Bekett and her clearly duplicitous boss, Tony Blair, must be truly
certain that Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz, Dan Halutz and now this Avigdor
Lieberman will take her words to the heart and immediately stop harming
Palestinian civilians once and for all.
Parroting the Israeli story
While western reactions to the massacre remained within the "normal
routine," much of the western media outlets sheepishly and
unsuspectingly parroted the Israeli narrative that the bloodbath was
unintentional and caused by some errant artillery shells.
For example, CBS News reported on 9 November that "Tens of thousands of
grieving Gazans, weeping in anguish and screaming for revenge, crammed
into a cemetery on Thursday to burry 18 civilians killed by an errant
Israeli artillery barrage."
Similarly, Richard Boudreaux, writing in the Los Angles Times, Nov. 10,
2006, parroted the same mendacity:
"It took 15 minutes of errant Israeli artillery fire into a row of
apartment buildings to kill 16 members of the clan and push surviving
relatives, once aloof toward armed struggle, into vengeful fury."….yes,
"errant fire" from Israel and "vengeful fury" on the Palestinian side!
The same pattern of reporting, where the Israeli account of the massacre
is taken at face value, was adopted by the bulk of the American press,
except for the Christian Science Monitor, which attributed the statement
to Israeli military and political officials but without endorsing it
itself.
Well, how could the writers of such reports, including the Associated
Press whose Jerusalem Bureau is staffed with fanatical American-Israeli
Zionists, who always seek in their reports and dispatches from Palestine
to portray Israel in good light as much as possible and portray the
Palestinians in bad light as much as possible, find out that the
artillery shells were "errant"?
Did they carry out an independent investigation to establish the truth
of their claims? Did they consult third-party experts to corroborate
these claims? Is taking Israeli army claims for granted in such
circumstances compatible with professional journalistic ethics?
In truth, this is a highly-biased reporting since the writers of such
reports and especially their editors back in New York and California
readily volunteer to exonerate the killers of any malicious intent.
Yes, news writers have every right to voice their views whenever they
like, but they have no right as journalists to print Israeli propaganda
and mendacity as "hard news" and "indisputable facts."
Unfortunately, it is such tendentious, irresponsible and unethical
reporting by most of the American and some of the European media of
Israeli atrocities and Nazi-like treatment of Palestinians that keeps
the bulk of the American and much of the European peoples in the dark
about the scandal of the Palestinian plight.
Even the BBC, which often seeks to portray itself as the paragon of
objectivity and truth, always makes sure that the Israeli "view point"
is prominently featured even at the risk of creating an intended or
unintended impression of symmetry between the murdered and their
murderers.
Indeed, in its report on the burial of the massacre’s victims in Beit
Hanoun on 9 November, BBC News devoted hundreds of sound-bites (six
paragraphs in the report’s printed form), see
www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6131860.stm, to Israeli claims that
the bombardment was carried out by mistake.
The report, among other things, quoted Olmert as claiming that the
killings were the result of "technical failure," that he was
"uncomfortable with the event" and "very distressed," that he "checked
and verified it" and that "it was not the policy."
Well, where is the balance in this kind of reporting? Where is the
"other view," namely that the shelling was likely to have been carried
out deliberately since the Israeli army knew quite well that it was
bombarding a densely-populated area? Besides, doesn’t this view, that
the killing was deliberate, merit reporting by the BBC especially in
light of the hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including dozens of
children, the Israeli occupation army has killed since its so-called
"withdrawal" from Gaza in August, 2005.
Or, does the BBC believe that the Israeli army is not capable of
committing atrocities and massacres, knowingly and deliberately and
Israeli leaders and officials are not capable of lying to cover up or
extenuate the savagery of their crimes.?
-###-
November 12, 2006 © Copyright November 12, 2006 by Khalid Amayreh -
[EMAIL PROTECTED] This article originates on
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org - Permission is granted for reprint in
print, email, blog, or web media if this credit, © By Khalid Amayreh,
for thepeoplesvoice.org, is attached and the title and text remain
unchanged. 'Western media parrots Israeli narrative on Beit Hanoun
Massacre', posted here: http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/cgi-
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===
-muslim voice-
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