Hamas,
Mickey Mouse And
Other Horror Stories:
Those Violent Palestinians Again
By Agustin Velloso
22 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The same thing applies to Palestinian
violence as to United States democracy: all the news media talk frequently
about it but none of them has ever seen it as it really is. The abundance
of news aimed at reporting the intrinsic evil of the Palestinians is
impressive. Last week one could see at peak viewing time Palestinian
pre-school teachers using Mickey Mouse to teach kids they must wipe
out Jews, make martyrs of themselves, fight to take over the world and
so on.
What a headline! What depth
of Middle East conflict analysis! Those children and their parents before
them have been subjected to constant Israeli bombing for years - attacks
that cause dead and wounded by the thousand - and yet, to the leading
lights of journalism, what matters, or rather what they are interested
in broadcasting, is that the children of these victims are taught from
infancy to turn into Islamist terrorists.
Would not the contrary be
news, according to a golden rule of the profession? To their tormentors,
Palestinian children write poems of love - orphaned by Israeli bombs
that have killed their parents, starving hungry thanks to a criminal
blockade by Israel and its allies, with no hope of leaving that hell
since the United Nations is in no hurry to oblige Israel to abandon
the Occupied Territories (after 40 years of illegal occupation now)
as it was to force Iraq to abandon Kuwait (after 6 months).
In that same week an Israeli
soldier, in a punishment operation in Nablus, killed an unborn Palestinian
whose mother is still lying wounded in hospital. Maha Katouri, a 30
year old Palestinian mother lost the child in her womb, seven months
into the pregnancy, to a bullet that perforated her abdomen and destroyed
her unborn baby's head.
Non-news is that the Israeli
soldier who fired the shot is in Occupied Palestinian territory illegally:
non-news also are his orders to shoot to kill Palestinians, including
women and children in their houses, not because Israel faces non-existent
Arab aggression, but rather to contribute, death by death, captive by
captive, eviction by eviction, to the genocide of the Palestinians.
For the international community the latest anniversary of the final
solution of the Jewish Question which ended with the complete defeat
of the Nazi regime is news. Non-news is the continuing final solution
of the Palestinian Question, begun with the establishment of Israel
and which every Israeli government since 1948 has continued with the
blessing of that same international community.
Just-barely-news is that
the same week a dozen Palestinians have died and many more have been
wounded at Israel's hands. Non-news is that the remainder suffers the
effects of an international economic blockade applied to a population
under military occupation by a member country of the United Nations.
Also non-news is that every last bullet has been paid for by the United
States which subsidises Israel's army of occupation with US$3 billion
a year.
News is the falsehood that
Condi Rice travels to Jerusalem to promote peace. Non-news is that the
European Union approves Israel's genocidal policy, since it does nothing
to make Israel respect UN resolutions and international humanitarian
law. News is that the European Union does not talk with the Hamas government,
which has not occupied Israel and has not broken international law,
because purportedly it includes extremists.
Non-news is that hundreds
of thousands of Palestinian children receive daily from the Israeli
Mickey Mouse throughout their lives an education far more effective
than one that even the most intelligent Palestinian teacher could not
devise: Occupier education. This teaches them the Occupier is much stronger
than the occupied and thus to abandon the land the Occupier covets or
take the consequences, which are non-news or old news: a wall that condemns
them to live in a prison, demolition house by house to make way for
colonies exclusively for Jews, the loss of means to make a living so
that they emigrate and, above all, prison (Israeli prisons hold 11,000
Palestinian captives) and death (5000 Palestinian dead since 2000) for
resisting all the foregoing.
Non-news is that hundreds
of thousands of Palestinian children grow up traumatized by the extreme
violence to which they are subjected by the fourth most powerful army
in the world, equipped with F-16 fighter bombers, Merkava tanks and
snipers whom Israel daily sends into the Occupied Territories to fire
on the unarmed civilian population. News, on the other hand, is that
Israeli children in Sderot suffer psychological stress from Qassam rockets,
whose minimal destructive capacity, however, is non-news: a total of
seven people in Israel have died from 4500 launches since 2001. Non-news
too is that between ten and twenty Palestinians regularly die from a
single Israeli missile.
It is unreasonable for these
journalists and editors to report stress suffered by children in Sderot
but not that of Palestinian children. Nor is it credible that these
reporters and opinion-formers cannot work out that the ambience of extreme
violence in which Palestinian children live not only explains why they
sing songs that help them endure the terror they live through, but also
that it is the inevitable result of Israel's criminal policies. It is
impossible to understand that the news is not the friendly Mickey Mouse
as a teaching aid for Palestinian kids, but rather the terrifying Israeli
soldier that shoots them point blank.
So why then do they publish
news as they do?Because they are supporters of Israel, racist towards
Palestinians and anti-Islamic or all these at once. Except to those
unwilling to see, this is so obvious that its demonstration has not
even needed the mention in this article of what some might say is fundamental:
that the Mickey Mouse news item is a fake. Its falsity parallels the
fraud used years ago to justify the first attack on Iraq: that Iraqis
were killing newborns by tearing them from incubators. The daughter
of the Kuwaiti ambassador in the United States enjoyed a universal audience
to watch her weep as she related this event, which existed entirely
in her imagination. The correction of her false witness was much more
discreet.
The Palestinian Mickey Mouse
story is yet one more of the numerous lies disseminated by Israel and
taken as it stood by Western journalists. The translation of the Mickey
Mouse words, again, as happens with statements about Israel attributed
to Ahmedinejad and in other cases too, is corrupt. But which news outlet
is going to ask for an explanation from the people who distributed it?
Which TV presenter is going to publicly admit they were fooled? Which
chief editor is going to confess that they failed to check the - obviously
Israeli - source?
Translation copyleft by tortilla
con sal.
Agustín Velloso Santisteban
UNED-Facultad de Educación
Dpto. Hª de la Educ. y Educ. Comparada
Paseo Senda del Rey, nº 7
28040-Madrid (ESPAÑA)
E-mail: [email protected]
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.
Click
here to comment
on this article