The Propaganda Campaigns: Anti-Semitism and Israel’s Killing of Arabs
BRIAN CLOUGHLEY | 08.04.2018 | FEATURED STORY
Concurrent with the anti-Russia propaganda frenzy in the United Kingdom there has been a series of intensive political attacks mounted against the leader of the opposition party in parliament, Jeremy Corbyn. Politics being politics, such an offensive is not unusual, and he has been declared by several newspapers to be a Kremlin Stooge because he cautioned against the hysterical reaction to the poisoning of British spy and former Russian citizen, Sergei Skripal, and observed objectively that “To rush way ahead of the evidence being gathered by the police, in a fevered parliamentary atmosphere, serves neither justice nor our national security.” The fact that he’s being proved right should be embarrassing for the propagandists, but it is irrelevant in today’s bigoted Britain.
The extremist papers didn’t stop the insults, and mounted another vicious campaign against him, involving the tried and proven propaganda weapon of accusing a target of being anti-Semitic, a description that is intended to conjure up images of concentration camps, piles of emaciated bodies, and hideously disfigured survivors of Hitler’s evil attempts to eradicate Jews from Germany. This gutter ploy is usually successful.
It may be coincidence that the anti-Corbyn onslaught reached its publicity peak at the time when Israeli soldiers killed sixteen Arabs in the Gaza Strip (two more died later), and it is notable that UK media cover of the killings was modest and almost disappeared under the weight of anti-Corbyn diatribes. (And let me make it clear that I am no admirer of Corbyn : he’s a machine political figure whose scruffy appearance appals me, although I have to say I consider he is one of the few UK politicians who sticks to his principles and doesn’t fiddle his expenses as so many continue to do.)
In its excellent summation of daily newspapers’ news and opinion the BBC recorded on 30 March that there was not one front page headline about the Gaza slaughter. The papers concentrated largely on nationalistic trivia, and the deliberate killing of sixteen unarmed Arabs by Israeli soldiers scored but a few sentences deep inside.
Then on 1 April “A number of leader columns discuss the anti-Semitism row that continues to trouble Labour — and none are kind. ‘Labour has become the nasty party,’ says the Telegraph... while the Sun insists the Labour leader ‘can't erase his past’.”
On and on went the propaganda tide with the anti-Semitic theme, while on and on went the little-reported grieving and funerals in Gaza. There was no doubt that Israel’s military had fired on and killed unarmed Arabs according to a long-standing plan. Indeed, even the Washington Post acknowledged that “Israel’s defence minister said that the military will not change its tough response to Hamas-led mass protests near Gaza’s border with Israel, warning that those who approach the border are putting their lives at risk. Avigdor Lieberman spoke near Gaza, where 18 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire Friday.”
The Israelis are determined to go on killing Arabs. On 29 March an official Israeli website posted a video showing a young Arab shot in leg with the comment that “This is the least that anyone who tries to cross the security fence between Gaza and Israel will face.” On 30 March Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman tweeted in Arabic that “Anyone who approaches the border puts his life in jeopardy.”
As recorded by Human Rights Watch, “Footage of demonstrations published by the Israeli army includes no evidence of firearms. The army published a video purporting to show two men firing at Israeli troops on March 30, but noted that this took place in northern Gaza Strip, not on the eastern border where the Land Day demonstrations took place. No demonstrators can be seen in the video.”
The Zionist propaganda is published ad nauseam by most western media, along with supportive Editorial and Opinion comment — although to be fair, the Washington Post did have the decency to note that “Two-thirds of Gaza’s 2 million people are descendants of refugees. Life in Gaza has become increasingly harsh after more than a decade of closures, with residents enduring daily power outages lasting hours.”
Human Rights Watch “reviewed footage it believes authentic based on an interview with the videographer that appears to show a demonstrator shot in the leg while praying and another video showing a man shot while throwing a rock. Other videos reviewed appear to show demonstrators shot while slowly walking toward the border empty-handed or holding only a Palestinian flag or retreating from the border. Interviews with six witnesses, including three journalists, indicated that soldiers shot at men who were in the area between the encampments and the fence but who posed no grave threat to anyone across the fence.”
These soldiers are murderers in uniform — but if you criticise Israelis it is verging on the automatic that you will be labelled “anti-Semitic.” The dark shadows of the Holocaust are cast selectively.
Some forty distinguished British academics wrote a open letter, published on 2 April, that among other things observed that “One of the main concepts in journalism education is that of framing: the highlighting of particular issues, and the avoidance of others, in order to produce a desired interpretation. We have been reminded of the importance of framing when considering the vast amounts of media coverage of Jeremy Corbyn’s alleged failure to deal with antisemitism inside the Labour party. On Sunday, three national titles led with the story while news bulletins focused on the allegations all last week...“
Where is the criticism in the UK’s newspapers of the butchery in Gaza? Where, for that matter, is the criticism of Israel that should have been raised in Britain’s Parliament? And in the United States Congress?
Reuters reported that “UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for an independent, transparent investigation” into the Gaza slaughter, but a proposed statement by the Security Council that there should be “respect for international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including protection of civilians,” was blocked by the United States, from which action it must be concluded that Washington does not believe in human rights law and protection of civilians.
Only one member of the US Congress criticised Israel for the killings. This isn’t surprising, because, as Foreign Policy Journal reported in 2016, at the “annual Policy Conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee” the speakers included “30 members of the US Congress, 25 of whom received 2016 contributions from pro-Israel PACs and individuals, averaging $36,000 per recipient ($908,000 in total) . . .”
In pristine Britain, the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI), a powerful and well-funded group of governing politicians, records with pride that “119 Conservative Members of Parliament, peers [members of the UK’s ridiculous Upper House of Parliament], senior party officials, and activists visited Israel with CFI between the May 2015 General Election and December 2017.” Nobody knows the depth of Zionist support there is in the cesspool of British politics.
It is not surprising that the UK-US pro-Israel propaganda campaign is thriving. Just as there is no doubt that the killing of Arabs will continue without criticism.
If a government representative of almost any other nation but Israel declared that anyone approaching its border would be killed, there would be outrage in Washington and London. But the Zionists can get away with murder.
posted by Satish Sharma at
19:01
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