Various things the Israeli authorities don’t want you to see

Thanks to commenter Utpal for alerting me to this one:

A CBC report with Neil Macdonald, showing the ethnic-cleansing angle on the murder of a Palestinian mother. The soldiers the Israeli news crew interviewed are most explicit on the point–one of them calls the Palestinian house they just invaded “dirty”.

Naturally, the Israeli authorities are pissed at the light this puts on them and their military operations. One of them, who condemns Palestinian “censorship”, actually says the Israeli station, Channel 2 (who deserve a lot of credit for filming this and having the guts to air it openly) should have exercised “self-censorship”! Double standards, anyone?

A commenter at YouTube writes:

If the failure to evacuate the injured woman was a mistake, then why are there so many reports of same or similar actions. It seems that there is a pattern whereby the Israeli military prevents humanitarian aid to reach the wounded and dying. And maybe there is a policy of such behavior.

It would certainly not be the first time an operation like this was ascribed to “a few bad apples”–remember My Lai? How about Abu Ghraib? Those were due to “bad apples” too, according to the US government. But the truth is that there was a pattern, and when followed to its source, it went straight to the top. The original Winter Soldier hearings proved that My Lai was not a “mistake”, nor an “exception”, much less “the fog of war”. One former GI said that the “last lesson you catch” before shipping out was how to disembowel and skin a rabbit–a clear exercise in brutality, and a demonstration of what soldiers bound for Vietnam were expected to do to any locals who got in their way. As for Abu Ghraib, it’s clear that all that abuse came from the top, too–someone in the bowels of the Pentagon must have had orders to use abusive prison guards, who had been that way in civilian life, as prison guards for Abu Ghraib. Just recently, Dubya admitted to having personally authorized the use of waterboarding. (He also vetoed a ban on it, which is a clear indicator of where he stands.)

No, this is not a case of “a few bad apples”. This is ethnic cleansing. Someone taught that “good Hebrew boy”, as the one soldier calls himself, how to dehumanize and brutalize Palestinians, and how to view them as unclean. It’s a lesson the Israelis have learned well from their US patrons. And THAT is something the IDF and its masters in the Israeli government don’t want you to know.

Last night I happened to be watching a CTV (Crappy TV) nightly newscast, and they came right out and told how the Israelis were controlling the media–especially foreign media. They won’t let them into Gaza unless maybe they’re “embedded” with the IDF, in which case, again, the Israeli authorities are clearly doing their best to make sure no one sees anything they don’t want the world to see–that is, anything that doesn’t present the Israelis as innocent victims defending themselves against an Islamist assault. It was not something I’d have expected from CTV, which is second only to CanWest Global in cheerleading for all things Israeli. I nearly fell out of my chair in shock. Even CBC didn’t air such a report, although as the Neil Macdonald piece above demonstrates, there is ample opportunity for them to report and comment.

Meanwhile, Media Lens demonstrates another media phenomenon, common in Britain as well as over here and in Israel–the blatant favoritism of the media in conflict reporting. The report is called “An Eye for an Eyelash”, and it’s the first of two parts, well worth reading.