First the Massacre, Then the Lies

"Initial autopsy findings showed a Palestinian boy [Mohammed Khadeir] found dead after being kidnapped in East Jerusalem was burned alive... Mohammed's cousin Tariq Khadeir... was savagely beaten on Thursday by what human rights groups said were undercover Israeli officers... Spokesman for the Israel police Micky Rosenfeld said a video circulated by the rights group was 'edited and biased'... he said Tariq was one of 6 Palestinians arrested - three of them carrying knives - after a clash in which 15 officers were injured when 'hundreds of rioters, many of them masked, hurled at the forces pipe bombs, Molotov cocktails, fireworks and stones'." (Palestinian boy was burned alive, autopsy suggests, Jodi Rudoren, New York Times/Sydney Morning Herald, 6/7/14)

Alert readers will find Rosenfeld's lies here familiar.

That's because they come from the same Israeli lie machine wheeled out when another group of uniformed Israeli thugs swung into action on the night of May 30, 2010, shooting up those on board the Gaza-bound Turkish aid ship Mavi Marmara.

Some extracts from Max Blumenthal's account of how the Israelis spun that massacre, from his must-read book Goliath: Fear & Loathing in Greater Israel (2013):

"As soon as the Israelis gained control of the Marmara, they rushed to the ship's kitchen and gathered all the knives they could find. Then they laid them out beside keffiyehs, Qurans, and any object that might convince the average Western news consumer that the flotilla was in fact a covert terrorist convoy...

"Having stockaded the flotilla activists, the Israelis proceeded to the next phase of their mission, robbing passengers - including credentialed journalists - of their cameras, laptops, and recording equipment... The Israelis intended to exploit the footage they had seized in order to establish a narrative that portrayed themselves as the true victims. SD cards and videotapes containing footage shot by passengers... were thrown in a giant junk heap, ensuring that the most damning and disturbing records of the attack would never see the light of day... The 5-second clip of what Israelis came to refer to simply as 'The Lynch' was culled from the trove of footage the IDF had stolen from the flotilla activists and journalists. Heavily edited over the course of 2 days, the clip was the only piece of footage that seemed to support the army's line. It was broadcast around the clock on the country's 3 main news channels, branding into the Israeli public's mind a sense that the commandos who stormed the MM had been unfairly and savagely abused by a band of terrorists and were forced to open fire just to survive.

"To complement this clip, the IDF Spokesperson's Unit pumped out buckshot of unsourced press releases to the national press corps insinuating that the flotilla was in fact an al-Qaeda-linked armada captained by anti-Semites. In almost every case, reputable military correspondents and network anchors diligently reproduced the press releases as news with only the most minor alterations...

"Two days later, the Spokesperson's Unit released an audio clip purporting to consist of transmissions between the MM and a naval warship. 'Go back to Auschwitz!' a Marmara passenger shouted to the Israeli naval captain, according to the IDF. YNet and Haaretz reported on and reproduced the audio clip without investigating its authenticity. Not only did the anti-Semitic slur sound like a mentally disturbed teenager making a prank call, but had reporters performed a cursory search of the IDF Spokesperson's Unit website they would have found a longer clip released on May 31 that featured a dramatically different exchange between the Israeli Navy and the MM with no mention of Auschwitz. Further, the voice of flotilla organizer Huwaida Arraf was featured in the 'Auschwitz' clip, yet Arraf was not aboard the Marmara... It seemed the army had fabricated the clip in order to inject the Holocaust into coverage of the flotilla raid, thereby inflaming the Israeli public with the notion that the whole world was indeed against them - and through no fault of their government.

"On my blog, I pointed out the discrepancies in the IDF's footage and raised the question of doctoring. The next day, the IDF conceded that it had, in fact, doctored the footage, releasing a 'clarification' and a new clip claiming to consist of the 'full' exchange between the navy and the flotilla..." (pp 105-10)

There's more in Goliathon the above, but I'm sure you've got the idea. (I might add, while I'm at it, that if you're interested in the psychopathology behind Mohammed Khadeir's immolation while still alive, and the radical re-arranging of his cousin Tariq's face, then Goliath's the book for you.)

Evey 3 Days Israel Murders a Palestinian Child

One Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days for the past 13 years

"Official statistics from the Ministry of Information in Ramallah have revealed that 1,518 Palestinian children were killed by Israel's occupation forces from the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000 up to April 2013. That's the equivalent of one Palestinian child killed by Israel every 3 days for almost 13 years. The ministry added that the number of children injured by the Israelis since the start of the second Intifada against Israel's occupation has now reached 6,000.

"'The International Day for the Protection of Children is on June 1,' said a spokesman, 'but Palestinian children are still subject to attacks by the Israelis and Jewish settlers on an almost daily basis.'

"Noting that 2012 saw an unprecedented rise in the number of children arrested by Israel forces, the report pointed out that 9,000 Palestinians under 18 years old have been arrested since the end of September 2000. Almost half of the Palestinian population is under 18. almost 250 Palestinian minors are being held in prison by Israel; 47 of them are children under 16 years of age." (middleeastmonitor.com, 4/6/14)

No Difference Between Blood & Blood?

"Violent clashes rocked Jerusalem yesterday following the discovery in a forest of the charred body of a 16-year-old Arab boy..." (Arab boy's murder unleashes fury, John Lyons, The Australian, 4/7/14)

His name: Mohammed Abu Khdeir.

"Naftali Fraenkel and Gilad Sha'er, both 16, and Eyal Yifrah, 19, were found on Monday dumped in a pit near Hebron in the West Bank after being kidnapped on June 12... The family of Naftali Fraenkel condemned Muhammed's murder. 'There is no difference between blood and blood,' Naftali's uncle, Yishai Fraenkel said." (ibid)

So there's no difference between Naftali's and Mohammed's blood? Really? Who is Yishai Fraenkel trying to fool?

The very reason - in fact, the only reason - the Fraenkels were able to move from Brooklyn to Occupied (River-to-Sea) Palestine so seamlessly is because Israel's blatantly apartheid Law of Return privileges their 'Jewish' blood over that of the non-Jewish Abu Khdeirs.

The fact that Mohammed was actually born in Palestine (as were his parents, and his grandparents, and his...) advantages him (and them) not a whit. Indeed, the Israeli government would have them all over the border in Jordan in an instant if it thought it could get away with it.

And it's all down, literally, to an accident of birth: none of them, you see, have Jewish mothers! So, no Jewish mothers... no 'Jewish' blood.

That precious commodity allows American Jews like the Fraenkels to move to, and settle just about anywhere in, Occupied (River-to-Sea) Palestine - as though it actually belonged to them!

Palestinian Arab blood, on the other hand, condemns folk like the Abu Khdeirs to all that living under the Israeli jackboot has to offer: humiliation, confinement, caging, detention, imprisonment, torture, dispossession, expulsion and... death.

'Jewish' blood means the Fraenkels have two homes, Occupied Palestine and the United States.

Arab blood means that the Abu Khdeirs can't even feel secure in their one, Palestinian home.

No, sorry, thanks to Zionist apartheid, there's a world of difference between blood and blood in Occupied (River-to Sea) Palestine.

(I am assuming, of course, that Yishai Fraenkel's statement is genuine. In a land where carefully crafted and targeted government PR, fed to a lazy, ignorant, and often partisan international media, tends to drown out the baying of settler mobs for Arab blood, one can never be certain.)  

"Mohammed's cousin, Majdi Abu Khdeir, said the kidnappers should suffer the same fate as the kidnappers of the three Jewish teenagers, whose houses in Hebron have been destroyed with explosives." (ibid)

The same fate, Majdi? Fat chance! As you know, equality's most emphatically not what Occupation and apartheid are all about.

Under Israeli apartheid, there's one law for you and yours - that of the jungle - and another for them and theirs.

Their murderers will, of course, never be found.

Incredibly, yours are 'known' and routinely dispatched, as often as not even before they strike.

But then, you'd know all about that.

Is Chris Mitchell Losing His Grip?

In Issue 43 2011 of the Quarterly Essay, Robert Manne wrote about Chris Mitchell, the editor of The Australian as follows:

"Because of the charismatic authority over his journalists exercised by Mitchell, and because of the costs that are paid by anyone in his paper who defies him, one very senior journalist likened the atmosphere inside the Australian to that of a cult." (Bad News: Murdoch's Australian & The Shaping of the Nation, p 4)

Here's cult leader Mitchell pointing the bone at Hamas in Wednesday's paper:

"Hamas cannot be surprised by the swiftness or intensity of the Israeli revenge attacks on Gaza that followed the discovery of the bodies of three teenage Jewish seminary students who were abducted and executed near Hebron. Evidence of the Palestinian terrorist group's involvement is overwhelming." (Hamas not fit for government, 2/7/14)

Now here's his Middle East correspondent, John Lyons, writing in the same issue (and on Page 1 no less):

"Israel has not produced any evidence of Hamas's involvement - Hamas vehemently denies any role - but in the Israeli court of public opinion Hamas has been convicted. Those involved were 'human animals', Netanyahu said, and 'Hamas will pay'." ('Hamas will pay': fears of new intifada, John Lyons)

What gives? Is Mitchell losing his grip?

All Sykes-Picot, No Balfour

You may have noticed references such as these to the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 in the Australian media:

"The rapid advance of the hardline Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham into Iraq's Sunni heartland has sparked a cottage industry of commentary on the plan devised by British diplomat Mark Sykes and his French counterpart, Francois Georges-Picot, that laid the basis for the map of the modern Middle East and led to the formation of Syria and Iraq." (Middle East map being redrawn before our very eyes, William A. Galston, The Wall Street Journal/The Australian, 19/4/14)

" [Iraq's] borders were constructed by Britain and France in 1920 in a reworking of their so-called Picot-Sykes agreement to divvy up control of the Middle East after the defeat of the Sunni-run Ottoman Empire. Borders were drawn north to south to create Iraq, in direct contradiction to the ancestry, language and faith divisions that run largely east to west across what is now Syria and Iraq. ISIL has boasted of destroying what it calls 'the Sykes-Picot conspiracy'." (Editorial: Unity government the only hope for Iraq, Sydney Morning Herald, 17/6/14)

I was intending to highlight this ms media habit of  invoking Sykes-Picot, while (studiously?) omitting all reference whatever to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, when I found myself beaten to the post (in both senses) by Philip Weiss of the Mondoweiss site. So rather than reinvent the wheel, here's his commentary - Reporters talk about Sykes-Picot of 1916 (and ignore the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (29/6/14):

"With the blurring of the border between Syria and Iraq by the Sunni militant group ISIS, American journalists have been talking a lot about the Sykes-Picot treaty, the secret agreement during World War I between the French and the British to carve up the Middle East when the Ottoman Empire ended. These journalists all describe Sykes-Picot as an instance of imperial arrogance: European powers dabbling in Middle East geography and ignoring traditional ethnic and religious lines. Fair enough. But if they're going to bring up Sykes-Picot as a sign of how wrong the West is about religion in the Middle East, why don't they bring up that other secret agreement of World War I, just a year later: the Balfour Declaration, when the British promised Lord Rothschild... that the Jews could have a 'national home' in Palestine? The Balfour Declaration was published in November 1917, but was arrived at after months and years of Zionist lobbying. And it also carved up the Middle East in ways that haunt us to this day. Here is some of the Sykes-Picot chatter...

[He cites several examples.]

"I'm as confused by these questions as any other American: I see a drawn-out and violent process in which dictatorships give way to democracies in the Middle East; I see a broad, conservative constituency in Egypt that prefers dictatorship to extremism and fears Egypt turning into Syria. But I also see our role in fueling religious extremism. Imperial Britain came up with the Balfour Declaration in utter defiance of local political and religious sentiment in 1917, and the creation of a Jewish state in 1948 engendered religious conflict in the region. When you travel around Palestine and its neighbors there is a lot of rage toward the Jewish state/US client, and not a lot of talk of a 'caliphate.' The State Department warned back in 1948 that recognizing a Jewish state would lead to endless unrest in the region; the reporters should be addressing that factor."

You can just imagine a Phillip Adams, or a Geraldine Doogue, or a James Carleton (to cite the ABC equivalent of those cited by Weiss), asking some interlocutor or other who's just invoked Sykes-Picot:  

Isn't what you say about Sykes-Picot as a source of sectarian divisions in today's Middle East somewhat overstated? Wouldn't a better example of colonial mischief-making be the Balfour Declaration? After all, it introduced into the area the mother-of-all sectarian states, the Jewish state of Israel, which went on in 1948 to purge Palestine, by fire and sword, of as many non-Jews, Christians and Muslims, as it possibly could at the time.

Not.

100 Years of a Shockingly Bad Idea

In 1929, 67 Jews were massacred by an Arab mob in the Palestinian city of Hebron.

To determine why, the British government of the day appointed a commission of inquiry known as the Shaw Commission.

Its report, issued in 1930, concluded that:

"There can be no doubt that racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future, was the fundamental cause of the outbreak of August last."

Now, 85 years later, the bodies of 3 Jewish settler youths have just been found in shallow graves, presumably murdered by Arabs from Hebron or thereabouts.

Were the Shaw Commission around today to determine why, they may well have concluded, in addition to the above, that:  

There can be no doubt that racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon their despair at the unrelenting Zionist colonization of their land, severe and extensive restrictions on their movements, the Israeli authorities' systematic failure to enforce law and order on violent settlers attacking them, their suffering at the hands of Israel's security forces, and fear for their very existence, is the fundamental cause of last month's murders.*

The inevitable Israeli hammering of the Gaza Strip, already underway following several weeks of Israeli murder and mayhem (known officially as 'Operation Brother's Keeper': 6 Palestinians dead, 120 wounded) against defenceless Palestinian communities in the West Bank, will, of course, be routinely portrayed, by our terminally myopic corporate media, simply as retaliation for the murders of the Israeli youths.

Any objective probe into the murders, however, whether it be the work of a revived Shaw Commission or that of a contemporary scholar tracing the violence back to its historical, near 100-year-old roots, will know where to place the blame. And guess what? It won't be with the Palestinians - any of them.

Here, for example, is the noted historian of World War I, Margaret MacMillan, author of The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, and Paris 1919, speaking recently on what is arguably the war's worst, and most enduring, legacy:

"The British had issued something during the First World War called the Balfour Declaration, and it was in the form of a letter to Lord Rothschild, a leading British Jew who supported the establishment of a Jewish homeland. And what the letter said was the British government looks with favour on the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And then it said something about 'due consideration being given of course to the wishes of the existing population.' The existing population, Arabs, who were both Muslim and Christian, was about 90% of the population or more, and so there really was a contradiction inherent here. A Jewish homeland was being established in a country where there was already a majority, a big majority, of non-Jewish people. Even at the time, there were people who said, 'Look, this going to cause trouble, because the existing inhabitants of Palestine are not going to particularly like a new entity with... Jewish settlers coming in from around the world. They're not going to like that new entity growing within their society, and there is going to be trouble.' And that indeed was absolutely right. And the Balfour Declaration, and the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, was the beginning of a long and complicated struggle between Jews and Arabs..." (The Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Rear Vision, Radio National, 29/6/14)

[*To adapt the findings of the 2007 report of The Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories and The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, Where Silence Reigns: Israel's Separation Policy & Forced Eviction of Palestinians from the Center of Hebron.]

Nothing to Worry About

There's a welter of items in the Australian press at the moment (most notably, of course, in the Murdoch press) about the government's response to the issue of Australian Muslims fighting with jihadist groups in Syria/Iraq.

The following letter, in The Australian Jewish News of June 27, suggests that some at least in the Jewish community understand that whatever the government is (or is intending to do) about Muslim ultras on the warpath might also have consequences for their Zionist counterparts:

"Recently, the media has been full of speculation over the Australian Muslims who have gone to Syria and Iraq to fight in the conflict there. There is talk that these individuals risk having their Australian citizenship revoked, thereby preventing their return to Australia. In the light of this I present the following theoretical (but highly possible) scenario. Suppose, in a future conflict, Israel finds itself in serious danger of annihilation. As in previous conflicts, Jewish volunteers from around the world (Australia included) rally to the call for help (mostly to replace Israelis in civilian roles, in order to free them up to join their armed force units). There would, in all probability, also be Australians with dual Israeli/Australian citizenship who would desire to join combat units. Do these Jewish volunteers potentially risk having their Australian citizenship revoked as well?" Dr Martin Jaffe, Caringbah, NSW

Frankly, I don't think Dr Jaffe has too much to worry about, do you?

[Related posts: Prisoner X5 (17/2/13); Green Light/Red Light (19/12/12); Mystery Man (21/6/12)]