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
No comments:
Post a Comment