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skinster wrote:Palestinians are not allowed to carry guns, unlike Israelis, including the illegal settlers in the West Bank.
Also, it would be nice if you could tone down your psychopathy. It's not a good look.
Israeli Government wrote:"It has to be understood that there are no innocent people in Gaza"
The View From The Ground by Martha Gellhorn - 2015
Then I remarked that Gaza town was a beehive of activity, with all the UNEF soldiers, Danes, Norwegians, Indians, Canadians, ... It is worse; it is a jail—with a magical long white sand beach, and a breeze, and devoted welfare workers (UNRWA) to look after the prisoners.
Near East Report - Volumes 18-20 - Page 55
Isaiah L. Kenen - 1974 - Snippet view - More editions
The Saudi Arabian radio, on Mar. 10, 1962, likened Nasser's regime in Gaza to Hitler's regime in occupied territories in World War II. "The Gaza is not a hell-hole, not a visible disaster. It is worse. It is a jail," wrote Martha Gellhorn after a visit.
Seeker8 wrote:Fucking hell. So is that not an admission by the Israeli governement that they are deliberately targeting civilians?
That's massive. That should be top headline on every news media.
FAIR wrote:Snipers Shooting Unarmed People at 100 Meters Isn’t a ‘Clash’
As FAIR has noted before, the term “clash” is almost always used to to launder power asymmetry and give the reader the impression of two equal warring sides. It obscures power dynamics and the nature of the conflict itself, e.g., who instigated it and what weapons if any were used. “Clash” is a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”
It’s predictable, then, that in coverage of Israel’s recent mass shootings in Gaza—which have killed over 30 Palestinians and injured more than 1,100—the word “clashes” is used to euphemize snipers in fortified positions firing on unarmed protesters 100 meters away:
*Journalist Among 9 Dead in Latest Gaza Clashes, Palestinian Health Officials Say (CNN, 4/7/18)
*Burning Tires, Tear Gas and Live Fire: Gaza Clashes Turn Deadly (Washington Post, 4/6/18)
*Demonstrators Wounded as Gaza Clashes Resume (Reuters, 4/7/18)
*Israel Clashes: Seven Palestinians Killed in Gaza Border Protests (Independent, 4/6/18)
*After Gaza Clash, Israel and Palestinians Fight With Videos and Words (New York Times, 4/1/18)
It’s almost as bizarre as the time several media outlets referred to a white nationalist driving a car into a crowd of unarmed protesters in Charlottesville as a “clash” (FAIR.org, 8/17/17):
“Clash” implies some degree of symmetry. When one side is dying by the dozens and the other is sitting behind a heavily secured wall, firing at will on unarmed people from hundreds of feet away (some of whom are wearing vests marked “PRESS”), this is not a “clash.” It’s more accurately described as a “massacre,” or at the very least, “firing on protesters.” (No Israelis have been injured, which would be a surprising thing if two sides were actually “clashing.”)
NYT: Syrian Troops Open Fire on Protesters in Several Cities
^ How media report on troops firing on protesters when it’s an official enemy doing the firing (New York Times, 3/25/11).
The fig leaf of “clashes” is not needed in reporting on US enemies. In 2011, Western headlines routinely described Libya’s Moammar Gaddafi and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad as having “fired on protesters”. Simple plain English works when reporting on those in bad standing with the US national security establishment, but for allies of the United States, the push for false parity requires increasingly absurd euphemisms to mask what’s really going on—in this case, the long-distance slaughter of unarmed human beings.
Israel has a state-of-the-art military: F35s, Sa’ar corvettes, Merkava tanks and Hellfire missiles, not to mention the most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world; total control over the air, sea and land. In the Great March of Return protests, the Palestinians have employed rocks, tires and, according to the IDF, the occasional Molotov cocktail, though no independent evidence has emerged of the latter being used. The power asymmetry is one of the largest of any conflict in the world, yet Western media still cling on an institutional level to a “cycle of violence” frame, with “both sides” depicted as two equal parties. The term “clashes” permits them to do this in perpetuity, no matter how one-sided the violence becomes.
https://fair.org/home/snipers-shooting- ... t-a-clash/
The ‘New York Times’ stops being a stenographer for the Israeli army (today anyway)
Maybe all the criticism of the New York Times’s coverage of Israel’s massacres in Gaza is having an impact. Today’s news analysis, by David Halbfinger, is strikingly more balanced than the paper’s previous reports. The article gives four paragraphs to Yousef Munayyer, who directs the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights, who points out, accurately, that:
This is not a battle that protesters are coming to with guns. They’re coming to it with their bodies and they’re confronting very real policies of violent repression. The protesters paid with their lives to get people to question whether these policies are justifiable.
In this article, the Times also stopped being the stenographer for the Israeli army. It notes that of the 20 Gazans killed by Israeli soldiers on March 30, the first day of the protests, “Videos showed that some were shot as they had their backs turned to the fence.”
Halbfinger also counters the Israeli contention that the Gazan demonstrators plan to invade en masse. He noted that this past Friday, April 6, although “. . . many protesters threw stones or rolled burning tires toward the fence, far more could be seen doing little more than standing around — chanting, singing and shouting.”
The analysis does quote a retired Israeli general warning darkly that the barrier fence is “not as strong and robust as people might think.” But then Halbfinger immediately adds his own rejoinder: Israel’s soldiers are still “aiming rifles at unarmed people.”
The article also adds credibility by quoting a genuine expert: Nathan Thrall of the International Crisis Group. It is an open secret in mainstream journalism that you can slant an article by picking whom to quote, and the Times has a proven record of digging up pro-Israel ideologues and stooges. Not Thrall.
Today’s news analysis is far from perfect. Here are a couple of suggestions for further improvement:
* The article does mention that Israel shot 7 journalists. The Times could follow the lead of the Washington Post and profile at least one of them: the 30-year-old who was killed, Yaser Murtaja, a remarkable young man whose courage and kindness touched both Gazans and outsiders who visited the occupied territory to report.
* The Times describes Hamas as “the Islamic militant group that rules Gaza and seeks Israel’s destruction.” Halbfinger is surely aware that Hamas has issued many statements strongly suggesting it is willing to compromise, including establishing “a truce.” Professor Jerome Slater is just one of the genuine scholars who have analyzed Hamas’s increasing flexibility. Halbfinger does not have to believe Hamas; he just has to report this side of the story alongside the bone-chilling warnings about Israel’s “destruction.”
Finally, regular readers of the Times’s coverage will gasp in astonishment at this long quote from the excellent Yousef Munayyer:
Frankly, I think [the protest inside the Gaza border] is Israel’s Achilles’ heel. And it’s very important in this moment for the international community to be supportive of the protesters. They’ve always said, ‘Abandon militancy, abandon violence.’ If the international community allows the violent repression of these protests without any real condemnation or intervention to stop the killing, it’s going to send a message that the world doesn’t want any Palestinian resistance — not violent, not nonviolent, not anything in between.
Hasbara Central is certainly in shock over the Times’s change in tone today. We will be watching the newspaper’s letters to the editor and elsewhere to see how Israel tries to counteract these signs of glasnost.
http://mondoweiss.net/2018/04/stenograp ... li-anyway/
Zionist Nationalist wrote:also whats the problem with soldiers cheering? if id shoot one of those savages I would cheer as well
Hamas is sending civilians in Gaza to die for media coverage, says Abbas’ advisor
by Itamar Marcus
Mahmoud Abbas’ senior advisor has accused Hamas of intentionally sending Palestinians in Gaza to “go and die,” for the sole purpose that Hamas will have stories of dead Palestinians to tell the media.
Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Abbas’ Advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Sharia Judge, delivered a sermon on Friday from the PA headquarters in Ramallah, in the presence of Mahmoud Abbas. He accused Hamas of deliberately encouraging civilians to endanger themselves: “You Palestinians, our people, go and die so that we’ll go to the TV and media with strong declarations.”
Al-Habbash claimed that the Palestinian population are not being fooled by Hamas anymore, and “sides with the PLO.”
Mahmoud Al-Habbash, Abbas’ Advisor on Islamic Affairs and Supreme Sharia Judge:
“The Palestinian people... doesn’t care about those [Hamas] with ‘the emotional stories of heroism,’ those with the slogans of heroism - slogans that when you hear them, you think that the people saying them are inside the Al-Aqsa Mosque after they liberated it. And afterwards you discover that they’re only selling illusions, trading in suffering and blood, trading in victims, [saying]: ‘You Palestinians, our people, go and die so that we’ll go to the TV and media with strong declarations.’ These [Hamas] acts of ‘heroism’ don’t fool anyone anymore. The Palestinian people... sides with the PLO.”
[Official PA TV, April 6, 2018]
Click to view
While Abbas’ advisor was criticizing Hamas for sending Palestinians to their death, Abbas’ Fatah Movement celebrated the participation of an infant in the Gaza demonstrations. Fatah posted a photo of a six-month-old baby who had been placed on a pile of tires. The tires would eventually be burned at the Gaza demonstrations:
Posted text: “A child no older than six months was among the participants in the demonstrations today (Friday) [April 6, 2018] and in the March of Return events on the eastern border of the Gaza Strip”
[Official Fatah Facebook page, April 6, 2018]
http://palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=25414
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