ISRAELI PROPAGANDA

The arch-Zionist and Israel apologist, Melanie Phillips – known affectionately as ‘Mad Mel’ to her critics – devoted two or her blogs this week to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Both were filled with a farrago of distortions, misrepresentations and racial stereotypes.

For example, in defending Israel’s illegal and bloody raid into the Gaza Strip this week, Mad Mel claims: “Today it [Israel] killed at least 18 people in Gaza, almost all of them Hamas terrorists.”

“Almost all”? Note the use of her weasel words. “Almost all” simply and bluntly means not all. It means some of those who were killed were not terrorists. They were innocents. And for them, Melanie Phillips has no words, no sympathy, no care, no compassion. They are, to quote historian Mark Curtis, “unpeople”.

It pains me to say this, and not simply about Zionist propagandists like Phillips but about pretty much most of my fellow citizens here in the West, but there does seem to be an unconscious racism which perhaps subconsciously masks our entire approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israelis – blond, blue-eyed, fair-skinned, often Western-educated if not Western-born – look like us, talk like us, live in towns like ours, shop in stores like ours, and so we readily and understandably identify with their pain and suffering. But the Palestinians? What would endear to us a people who combine dark skins, headscarves, tribal backgrounds and the Islamic faith? Why should we care about their lives, their futures, their children?

Why? Because they feel pain like we do. They are human beings like us. They deserve to live their lives in safety and security, as we do.

Take Asad Taafish, a retired, 65-year-old businessman, who was killed this week by a bullet from an Israeli sniper as he walked through the family's farmland close to the boundary with the Jewish state.

Take Abd Salam, an 18-year-old student who was killed this week by Israeli fire as he was leaving his school after taking one of his final-year exams.

Do their deaths not feature on the Melanie Phillips moral radar? Will she shed any tears for them? Of course not. For her, all that matters is that “almost all” of the dead are “Hamas terrorists."

Phillips is part of a group of ultra-right-wing, pro-Israeli, Zionist hawks who believe the Jewish state can do no wrong and the only deaths that matter are Jewish deaths.

She writes, perhaps ironically, in one of her postings that "the aggressor is still continuing to murder its victims and to incite others to do so.” I could not pen a better description for the Israelis if I tried.

Oh, and for those of you want to see with your own eyes the blatant and callous violence that the Israeli occupying forces choose to inflict on all those who stand up to them, including pro-Palestinian Jewish protesters and fellow Israeli citizens, check out this video: