What Palestinians Need to Do...

... to get Western media sympathy

by As'ad AbuKhalil (english.al-akhbar.com, 14/7/14)

Basically, for Palestinians to get Western media sympathy and human rights legitimacy, they need to emulate Israeli tactics and methods. Here's what they should do:

1) Palestinians are justified in killing Israelis so long as they first knock on their roofs or call them on their cellphones.

2) Palestinians are justified in shelling Israel provided they declare that their intention is not to harm civilians.

3) Palestinians can get the support of Western media if they refer to Israeli civilian targets as command and control centres.

4) Palestinians are justified in killing Israeli civilians so long as they claim that Israeli terrorists are hiding behind them.

5) Palestinians need to kill far more Israelis than they do so that the kill ratio becomes more like it is now in Gaza - 200 to 0. This is because the absence of casualties in Israel makes Israel the victim and not vice versa.

6) Palestinians need to acquire far more advanced weapons because Human Rights Watch has ruled that possessing advanced weapons makes you morally superior and less liable to commit war crimes.

7) Palestinians should include in their casualty lists all of those suffering from 'shell-shock', or who die from illness or natural causes in times of conflict.

8) Palestinians need to form a lobby to control the US Congress.

9) Palestinians need to be less poor and speak in unaccented American English to make them more friendly to American television audiences.

10) Palestinians need to persuade the New York Times and the Washington Post to plaster the pictures and profiles of their dead on the front pages, otherwise no one in the US will believe that they're victims.

11) Palestinians need to refer to Israelis as terrorists because that makes you the victim - in the case of Israeli terrorists that is.

12) Palestinians need to claim that they are consumed with anguish over any deaths they cause on the Israeli side and to pretend that this makes them less guilty of war crimes. Invoking anguish makes Israeli terrorists sympathetic figures in US eyes.

13) Palestinians need to convert en masse to Judaism because Islam, and even eastern Christianity, is not something westerners identify with.

14) Palestinians need to acquire an air force ASAP and to use it regularly against Israel because that would make them more impressive in Western eyes

15) Palestinians need to obtain the support of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands at the UN because those two states are a great help in protecting Israel from international condemnation.

16) Palestinians need to declare the Saudi king their leader because the Saudis enjoy wide respect in Western capitals.

17) Palestinians need to stop punishing collaborators and agents of Israeli terrorism who provide bombing co-ordinates to the Israeli military because they are the only Palestinians who are liked by Western media and governments.

18) Palestinians in Gaza need to remind the West, just as Israel does on a daily basis, that their government is the only democracy in the Middle East.

19) Palestinians need to field a national orchestra because Aaron David Miller once told me that it is the very existence of an Israeli national orchestra that explains American support for Israel.

20) Palestinians need to label their victims as Mossad-affiliated, or just plain Mossad, terrorists. This labelling trick has worked wonders for Israel.

21) Palestinians need to show the world that they drink whiskey. That always seems to impress the hell out of American correspondents. They're not used to seeing Arabs drink whiskey.

22) Palestinians need to call any attack on their cause racist and anti-Arab, just as Israel always describes criticism of its policies and war crimes as anti-Semitic.

23) Palestinians need to appoint Abe Foxman as their Washington representative. For some bizarre reason, the US media consider him an authority on the Palestinian national movement.