Journalistic
Cliches: 'Surgical Air Strikes', 'Rooting Out Terror', and 'Cyber-Terrorism'
Cannot Conceal Reality
by Robert
Fisk
Terror,
terror, terror, terror, terror. Here we go again. Israel is going to “root out
Palestinian terror” – which it has been claiming to do, unsuccessfully, for 64
years – while Hamas, the latest in “Palestine’s” morbid militias, announces that
Israel has “opened the gates of hell” by murdering its military leader, Ahmed
al-Jabari.
Hezbollah
several times announced that Israel had “opened the gates of hell” for
attacking Lebanon. Yasser Arafat, who was a super-terrorist, then a
super-statesman – after capitulating on the White House lawn – and then became
a super-terrorist again when he realized he’d been conned by Camp David; he,
too waffled on about the “gates of hell” in 1982.
And
we journos are writing like performing bears, repeating all the clichés we’ve
used for the past 40 years. The killing of Mr Jabari was a “targeted attack”,
it was a “surgical air strike” – like the Israeli “surgical air strikes” which
killed almost 17,000 civilians in Lebanon in 1982, the 1,200 Lebanese, most of
them civilians, in 2006, or the 1,300 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in
Gaza in 2008-9, or the pregnant woman and the baby who were killed by the
“surgical air strikes” in Gaza last week – and the 11 civilians killed in one
Gaza house yesterday. At least Hamas, with their Godzilla rockets, don’t claim
anything “surgical” about them. They are meant to murder Israelis – any
Israelis, man woman or child.
As,
in truth, are the Israeli attacks on Gaza. But don’t say that or you’ll be an
anti-Semitic Nazi; almost as evil, wicked, unspeakable, devilish and murderous
as the Hamas movement with which – again, please don’t mention this – Israel
happily negotiated in the Eighties when they encouraged this bunch of mobsters
to take power in Gaza and thus decapitate the exiled super-terrorist Arafat.
The new exchange rate in Gaza for Palestinian and Israeli deaths has reached
16:1. It will rise, of course. The exchange rate in 2008-9 was 100:1.
And
we are myth-making too. The last Israeli war in Gaza was such a stunning
success – “rooting out terror”, of course – that their supposedly élite units
couldn’t even find their own captured soldier Gilad Shalit, eventually produced
last year by Mr Jabari in person.
Mr
Jabari was the “No 1 shadowy leader” of Hamas, according to the Associated
Press. But how on earth can he be shadowy when we know his date of birth,
family details, his years of imprisonment by Israel during which he changed
allegiance from Fatah to Hamas? So while I’m on it, those years of Israeli
imprisonment didn’t exactly convert Mr Jabari to pacifism, did they? Well, no
tears then; he was a man who lived by the sword and died by the sword, a fate
which, of course, will not afflict Israel’s warriors of the air as they kill
civilians in Gaza.
Washington
supports Israel’s “right to defend itself” then claims a spurious neutrality –
as if Israel’s bombs on Gaza didn’t come from the United States as assuredly as
the Fajr-5 rockets come from Iran.
Meanwhile,
the pitiful William Hague holds Hamas “principally responsible” for the latest
war. But there is no such evidence that this is true. According to The Atlantic
Monthly, the Israeli killing of a “mentally unfit” Palestinian who strayed
towards the border may have been the start of the latest war. Others suspect the
killing of a small Palestinian boy may have been the provocation. But he was
shot dead by the Israelis when an armed Palestinian group tried to cross the
frontier and was confronted by Israeli tanks. In which case Palestinian gunmen
– albeit not Hamas – may have kicked-off the whole shooting-match.
But
is there nothing to stop this nonsense, this garbage war? Hundreds of rockets
fall on Israel. True. Thousands of acres of land are stolen from Arabs by
Israel –for Jews and Jews only – on the West Bank. There isn’t even enough land
left there now for a Palestinian state.
Delete
the last two sentences, please. There are only good guys and bad guys in this
outrageous conflict in which the Israelis claim to be the good guys to the
applause of Western countries (who then wonder why a lot of Muslims don’t like
Westerners very much).
The
problem, oddly, is that Israel’s actions in the West Bank and its siege of Gaza
are bringing closer the very event which Israeli trumpets it fears every day:
that Israel faces destruction.
In
the battle of rockets – not least Iran’s Fajr-5s and Hezbollah’s drones – a new
warpath is being trodden by both sides. It’s no longer about Israeli tanks
crossing the Lebanese border or the Gaza border. It’s about rockets and hi-tech
drones and computer attacks – or “cyber-terrorism”, of course, if committed by
Muslims – and the human dross ripped apart by the wayside will be even less
relevant than it has been over the past three days.
The
Arab awakening now takes its own path: its leaders are going to have to follow
their public’s mood. So, I suspect, is poor old King Abdullah of Jordan.
America’s clowning for “peace” on Israel’s side is no longer worth the candle
among Arabs. And if Benjamin Netanyahu believes that the arrival of the first Iranian
Fajr rockets necessitates the Israeli big bang on Iran, and then Iran fires
back – and perhaps at the Americans, too– and brings in Hezbollah – and Obama
gets swallowed up in another Western-Muslim war, what happens then?
Well,
Israel will ask for a ceasefire, as it routinely does in wars against
Hezbollah. It will plead yet again for the undying support of the West in its
struggle against world evil, Iran included.
And
why not praise the killing of Mr Jabari? Please forget that the Israelis
negotiated via the German secret service with Mr Jabari himself, less than 12
months ago. You can’t negotiate with “terrorists”, right? Israel calls this
latest bloodbath Operation Pillar of Defense. Pillar of Hypocrisy, more like.
© 2012 Independent/UK
Robert Fisk is Middle East correspondent
for The Independent newspaper. He is the author of many books on the
region.
Donations
can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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