The 'F' Word

Ever noticed how Fairfax and Murdoch routinely deploy the 'F' word - 'fled' - to mask the reality of the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine?

Three very recent examples:

"But her [Dr Jean Calder] heart was elsewhere and by January 1981 she was in Beirut as a volunteer for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, working at the Haifa Rehabilitation Hospital in the Burj Al-Barajneh refugee camp, established by the UN in 1948 for Palestinians who fled from the Galilee in what is now Israel." (An act of love amid Gaza's war, Ruth Pollard, Sydney Morning Herald, 23/11/13)

Pollard wouldn't dare tell us who or what they fled from. Maybe the Palestinians are just a naturally skittish people?

"The descendants of Palestinians who fled their homes in 1948 when the state of Israel was created still live in squalid refugee camps across Lebanon." (Mountain refugees left in a freezing limbo, The Times/AFP, The Australian, 14/12/13)

Notice here how the unnamed Murdoch journalist draws no connection between 'fleeing their homes' and Israel's 'creation'. These are apparently two, quite unrelated phenomena!

Now here's my favorite. (Dima Bawab, BTW, is a British soprano "taking music workshops and concerts to Palestinian people in the West Bank." Note, not the occupied West Bank.)

"Bawab, 32, was born in Jordan and has Palestinian heritage: both of her parents were born in Jerusalem." (Choir noted for change, Matthew Westwood, The Australian, 14/12/13)

Bawab was born in Jordan - of parents born in Jerusalem! So why wasn't she born in Jerusalem?

Westwood's left that bit out. Being born in Jordan of parents born in Jerusalem is made to sound like a completely natural experience.

Maybe they just moved to Jordan because they were bored with Jerusalem? Maybe the air was better there? Hell, maybe the Centrelink payments in Jordan were better? Who knows? Who cares?

Here's a media culture that can't get enough of the 'Holocaust' (or its paler reflections, the 'killing fields' of Cambodia, Rwanda or Bosnia), but of the driving out, by bomb and bullet, of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948... not even a whisper.