1
Cease-Fire: Can’t be done, impossible, no way, how dare you even suggest it, are you friends with Mel Gibson?
2
Sustainable Cease-fire: We’ll give your boys another 10 days to decimate Gaza after it had just managed to recover from the last time we invaded and raped it, as long as it is sustainable.
3
48 Hour Ceasefire: Doh, the army has killed a lot of kids this time, we need 48 hours for the media to focus on something else so we can get back to it.
4
Self-defense: Taking an eye for most of your face, including blowing up your home, economic crucifixtion and group punishment. Plus burning down any of your pets homes, you never know how many pets later become Hamas agents.
5
Justified Response: Bringing a laser guided phosphorus bunker busting missile to a knife fight.
6
Hamas Target: This can be anything from bridges, apartment buildings, grain carrying trucks and Flour mills. Oh and apparently UN schools filled with children count as well.
7
Pathology of war: Either The Israeli self-image of rationality, self-confidence, restraint, pragmatism, and marshal moral superiority are delusions and myths, constructed to protect the Israeli psyche, manipulated by the state to keep alive the specter of existential terror in the Israeli public and to disguise the state's raison d'etre, expansion and ethnic cleansing in Palestine OR This is all about the return glorified sky rockets that have only killed 4 people.
8
UN Schools: Even if you’ve called our friendly 0800 ‘Your bombing me by mistake’ Israeli Defense hotline 10 times screaming for us to stop aiming at you, I’m afraid you could be a camouflaged Hamas Target. And the last thing we need when we are committing a dirty war on the flimsiest of excuses, is the international community.
9
UN Resolution: To be ignored and belittled and labeled as unbalanced, bordering on anti-Semitic. Put out press releases suggesting Mel Gibson wants to replace the UN Secretary General.
10
International condemnation: To be shrugged off with the same disdain the United States showed the world when it invaded Iraq. Suggest Mel Gibson has something to do with it.
I despair at the brutality, the lack of humanity and callousness of the Israel attacks on Gaza; at the lies and distortions coming from the Israeli spokespeople and apologists; and of the smirking Bush Jr on my TV yesterday (same lies as his claims of WMDs as a justification for attacking Iraq0.
ReplyDeleteWe see this humanitarian outrage happening in front of us daily on our TV screens, and Israel gets away with it because they have the support of the most powerful government in the world, the US.
The Israeli propaganda machine has become very sophisticated:
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090104/FOREIGN/882042198/0/SPORT
This is one of the chief lessons of the Lebanon war of 2006, said defence officials. One of the major changes since 2006 is the creation of the National Information Directorate, a body set up last summer on the recommendation of the Winograd inquiry into Israel’s failures in Lebanon.
Led by Yarden Vatikai, a former official with the defence ministry and the Jewish Agency, the directorate decided to replace the traditional wartime press conferences with a wide range of initiatives using new media.
The article also says:
Israel has turned to other websites, such as Facebook, blogs and chat rooms, often relying on former army personnel and public relations consultants, to advance its case. According to the Israeli media, the army has been advising 50 influential bloggers in the United States alone.
In addition, reporters and diplomats have been blitzed with text messages offering interviews, briefings and tours of Israeli communities in the Negev close to the Gaza border. Other initiatives are likely to be unveiled if and when a ground invasion is launched.
“We have photographers embedded in all the units preparing to enter Gaza and we already have incredible footage that we are planning to release [if] we go in,” Dinor Shavit, commander of the Israeli army’s filming unit, told The Jerusalem Post newspaper.
Mainstream Western media also report on the extent of the Israeli propaganda machine and strategies:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7809371.stm
The Israeli propaganda effort is being directed to achieve two main aims.
The first is to justify the air attacks. The second is to show that there is no humanitarian calamity in Gaza.
But some of the Israeli propaganda merchants don't even bother to put their comments into their own words, but put their names to someone else's cut and paste job:
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2009/01/04/they-lob-chutzpah-bombs-too/
Clearly, this is just a press release created by the American Jewish Committee and being passed off by its members as their heartfelt and original opinions.
The author of the report on some examples of these cut and paste jobs concludes:
I'm sure the members all do genuinely feel that way, but did they really need to fake homegrown gravitas to ensure publication in as many local opinion pages as possible? Probably. You don't engage in large-scale propaganda – excuse me, "a public relations campaign" – unless you feel like you got caught with your hand in the cookie jar.
To Anonymous above:
ReplyDeleteRight. So next time we'll denounce Israel's mass murder of civilians, we'll make sure to condemn all other outrages occurring in the world to accommodate your extreme pro-Israeli sensitivity.