Monday 7 July 2014

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth




Please remind us again - is Israel the only democracy in the Middle East, where the rule of law prevails! It is nauseating to put up with jibes that are not only false, but carry an obvious racist undertone, implying that the Arabs are not civilised enough to be democratic. Israel could have proven its democratic credentials by capturing the culprits that killed the three Israeli teenagers, and then trying them through the courts. Instead, it embarked on the usual route of issuing collective punishment on the entire Palestinian people by bombing Gaza, carrying out arbitrary arrests of ‘suspects’, and invading Palestinian houses at will, as if they have no basic human right of privacy; such behaviour is reminiscent of the Nazis in Germany hounding the Jews, and not a modern democracy.

It is not enough that Israel continues to use the victimhood of Nazi Germany, known as the holocaust industry, to make political mileage, but they go further and use that perversely to justify the persecution of the Palestinians in a way that is replicating the Nazi behaviour. To some extent this makes sense, as the defenceless Palestinians are far easier to blame and target, than confronting the mighty Germans.


With respect to the murder of the three teenagers, of course, the Palestinians are the prime suspect, and given that no ransom was demanded the motive remains uncertain. It could have been the work of some lone serial killer, or some angry Palestinians seeking vengeance or some other party. It is not enough for a state that claims to be a beacon of democracy among the Arab ‘savages’ to act on the basis of suspicion, let alone issue collective punishment.  

Then the situation gets worse, after three weeks the bodies of the three dead teenagers are found, and in response the old Biblical dictum of an “eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” is applied indiscriminately on an innocent Palestinian boy, by some Israeli ‘settlers’; Mohammed Abu Khdair, a 17-year-old Palestinian is captured by them, and then burnt alive by these primitive savages and there is no other way to describe the act! Such behaviours emanating from the Israeli ‘settlers’ or those engaged in theft of Palestinian land in violation of the UN resolution, cannot be decoupled from the racist edicts issued by the fanatical Rabbis that encourages this sort of barbaric conduct. However, the media is not interested in this sort of extremism - who would want to be labelled as anti-Semitic and risk losing financial support and find other obstacles appearing.

After three weeks of intense media coverage, the western media loses its fork-tongue; the gruesome murder of the Arab boy is given a low intensity media coverage, coupled with the carefully selected or omitted vocabulary of militant, fanatical, extremists, which all proves the disproportionate influence of Zionists controlling the media, and the central media message is - Israeli blood is more sacred than Palestinian blood, and only the Palestinians are militant, fanatical and extremists.  

When this event has subsided, you will once again hear that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East; such crude propaganda usually emanates from the likes of Fox News and the right wing cabal. This sort of racist jibes suggest the primitive Arabs have not climbed up the civilisation ladder far enough. However, it would help if the West did not placate the Arab drive towards popular rule, by aiding nasty dictators; take your pick, General Sisi of Egypt who ousted the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood, the House of Saud, and many of the despots elsewhere in the Muslim world.

Amongst all this, we see some hope; the families of the victims, the Arabs and the Jews console each other, both sides have exchanged condolences. Every child is precious to the respective parent, and no one can understand this better than the one who has lost a child. To prevent further escalation, Israel and the Palestinian authorities should work together to capture all the culprits and apply the due process of law instead of collective punishment.  And let us remember that it was Mahatma Gandhi, who put a twist on the Biblical principle and said: an eye for and a tooth for a tooth makes the whole world go blind; indeed hate and anger blinds people.  

Yamin Zakaria (yamin@radicalviews.org)
Published 07/07/2014
London, UK 



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