Flabbergasted

"I recall the first time I felt the tragedy of the Palestinians penetrate my Zionist shield... I went to inspect the village well of Rana, near Beit Jbrin. I remembered the place from a (childhood) trip with my father, and the desolation - empty houses still standing, the ghost of a village once bustling with life - stunned me." (Meron Benvenisti, former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, 2002)

No one needs reminding that the establishment and maintenance of colonial-settler states means death and dispossession for indigenous peoples, but of all such states none work so hard at trying to erase all trace of their country's indigenous inhabitants or covering up their crimes against them as Israel:

"On May 14, 1948 the British Mandate in Palestine ended with the withdrawal of the last British military units. The same day David Ben Gurion declared the fulfillment of Herzl's dream: the emergence of Eretz Israel (Hebrew: the Land of Israel). At that very moment, according to the Zionist world view, historic Palestine permanently ceased to exist as either a geographical, historical or political unit. The renaming of Palestine was not the product of consultation with the indigenous Palestinians, who to this day have never accepted its abolishment. Rather it was the product of Zionism's unilateral determination to impose Hebrew-defined identifiers on every feature of the landscape - rivers, mountains, vallies, towns and even street names. This wholesale renaming process was meant to allow new Jewish settlers to feel an immediate bond with a place they had never been to before. It was also meant to send a message of deep, vast and seemingly irreversible change to the indigenous Palestinians. Understanding this renaming process, called 'the Judaization of place-names' by Benvenisti, is important because it reveals Zionism's attitude towards another form of landscape language. To Zionists the abolishment of Palestine was merely a logical first step in the process of creating a place that would project Zionist hegemony, including language hegemony, into every imaginable sphere. Palestine became 'Israel', the West Bank became 'Judaea and Samaria', Palestinians became 'Israeli Arabs'. Zionism's self-serving attitude towards language has generated innumerable international controversies over terminology right up to the present: wall vs fence, occupation vs settlement, expansion vs natural growth, colonialism vs historical rights. The myriad international controversies that have orbited Zionism's idiosyncratic use of language are mere distractions: they universally fail to comprehend the Zionist assertion of a right to replace at will normative descriptive language with a prescriptive, ideologically-driven lexicon. The ambiguities that result from this clash of lexicons are barriers to a plain language understanding of Israel-as-vision versus Israel-as-reality." (New Curriculum, slideshare.net/PalestinePosterProject/new-curriculum)

This process of corrupting and manipulating language to distract from the criminal and unrelenting colonisation of Palestine, from the sea to the river, is the work of a small army of Israel lobby nags and scribblers who bully and pester ms media outlets to ensure that as little of the awful reality filters through to the public as possible. In particular, use of the word 'occupation' to describe Israel's 44-year-old occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip is a standing affront to this lot. But it's not just the media who are expected to toe the party line here, it's all of us:

"A Perth-based ticketing agency has agreed to remove 'Occupied Palestinian Territories' as an address option for overseas subscribers to its website, after being alerted to its presence by The Australian Jewish News. BOCS Ticketing responded immediately to AJN queries, contacting its licensing company, which deleted the option immediately... The AJN was notified about the politically sensitive address option that exists on various portals by Collingwood Football Club supporter Kovi Rose, who discovered the listing on a drop-down menu while trying to sign up for the club's newsletter on the Ticketmaster website. 'This shocked me', he said. 'Referring to it as an 'occupied territory' is a left-wing political statement which unfairly reflects detrimentally on Israel; and such statements have no place or involvement in the world of sports'." (Ticket giants occupy shaky territory, The Australian Jewish News, 19/8/11)

Thank you, Kovi Rose. Kovi who?

"Kovi Rose is a Mount Scopus graduate who made aliyah in March 2011," says his one-line bio at galusaustralis.com where he's been thrilling the faithful with stories about how Israel's now his home and how he can't wait to join the Israel Occupation Forces in order to "protect Israel from its enemies." Oh, and he's all of 18 years.

But it get's worse. Here's a sentence of Kovi's from his 5/6/11 post Countdown to Draft Day: "The fact that many people forget when they talk about Israel's soldiers, Israel's actions, and Israel's occupation..."

Occupation? Did he say occupation? You bet he did!

"... is that the majority of these fighter's [sic]..."

A graduate of Melbourne's Mount Scopus College, which received a cool $925,000 of taxpayer funding from heavy Kevvie in 2009, and he still doesn't know what to do with an apostrophe!

"... are less than 20 years old."

To sum up: here we have a wet-behind-the-ears, barely literate footie fan and hypocrite, with an Israeli-occupied mind, who, on the completion of his Australian taxpayer-funded religious school education, is off in occupied Palestine to lord it over the natives as part of the Israel Occupation Forces, bitching about a ticketing agency's use of the term Occupied Palestinian Territories to a Zionist propaganda sheet which only has to snap its finger for the offending word to be removed.

My flabber is well and truly gasted.