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JANUARY 13,2009
 On March 24, 1999, an emotional Tony Blair appealed to the House of Commons and to the people of Britain:"We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitariancatastrophe."Blair described the emergency:"Let me give the House an indication of the scale of what is happening: a quarter of a millionKosovars, more than 10 per cent of the population, are now homeless as a result of repression bySerb forces... Since last summer 2000 people have died." (Blair: 'We must act - to save thousandsof innocent men, women and children,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999;www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/ Story/0,,209876,00.html)Not even Blair claimed all the killings had been on one side. George Robertson, the UK Defence Secretary at thetime of the crisis, testified before the House of Commons that until mid-January 1999, "the Kosovo LiberationArmy [KLA] was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been". (Quoted, NoamChomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Routledge, 2003, p.56)The Guardian rallied to Blair's cause:"The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect thepeople of Kosovo... If we do not act at all, or if there is a limited bombing campaign which stillfails to change Milosevic's mind, what is likely to be Kosovo's future?" (Leader, 'The sad need forforce, Kosovo must be saved,' The Guardian, March 23, 1999)The following day, NATO began its 78-day blitz of Serbia.Ten years later and almost one-half of the 2,000 death toll that so horrified Blair and the Guardian in 1999 hasbeen reached by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in its massacre of 890 Palestinians in just over two weeks. Some3,800 more have been wounded. The current slaughter is far more one-sided than Kosovo. There have so far been3 Israeli civilian deaths and 10 soldiers killed: 4 of these were victims of their own 'friendly fire'.KLA attacks did nothing to temper media outrage at the spectacle of the Serbian state attacking tiny Kosovo. Thefocus was on Serbian "massacres" and "genocide". The Observer wrote of the alleged killing of 45 Albaniancivilians in Racak by Serb armed forces on January 16, 1999:"History will judge that the defining moment for the international community took place on 16January this year... Albanians returning after an attack by Serb security forces discovered thebodies of men they had left behind to look after the houses." (Peter Beaumont, Justin Brown,John Hooper, Helena Smith and Ed Vulliamy, 'Hi-tech war and primitive slaughter - SlobodanMilosevic is fighting on two fronts,' The Observer, March 28, 1999)Serb forces, the Observer wrote, were "pursuing their own version of a Balkan Final Solution". (Ibid.)In 1999, British and American media were full of talk of "genocide" in Kosovo. A Nexis database search showedthat between 1998-1999 the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Time used"genocide" 220 times to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. (Email from Edward Herman to Media Lens, August 27,2002)We have found no examples of a British journalist describing Israeli actions as "genocidal" over the last month.Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips made rare use of the word on January 5:"Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country [Israel] underattack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter?" (Phillips,'Yes, this war is terrible. But the alternative was worse - for us all,' Daily Mail, January 5, 2009)
AN EYE FOR AN EYELASH: THE GAZA MASSACRE - PARTS1 & 2
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Israel's massacre is presented as a "war", as a "Gaza conflict" between two sides engaged in "fighting". This is thestandard fiction, as Tim Llewellyn, the BBC's former Middle East Correspondent, noted five years ago:"In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, 'balance', the BBC's crudely applieddevice for avoiding trouble, means that Israel's lethal modern army is one force, thePalestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other 'force': two sides equally strongand culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists onboth sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington..." (Llewellyn, 'Whythe BBC Ducks the Palestinian Story - Part 1,' Media Lens, January 15, 2004)Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, one of two foreign doctors working at Gaza's biggest hospital, al-Shifa, told CBSNews:"I've seen one military person among the hundreds that we have seen and treated. So anyonewho tries to portray this as sort of a clean war against another army are lying. This is an all-outwar against the civilian Palestinian population in Gaza and we can prove that with thenumbers." (CBS News, January 5, 2008;http://uk.youtube.com /watch?v=Ev6ojm62qwA)Even the death toll cited above does little to communicate the true one-sidedness of the wider violence,injustice and cruelty. One hardly knows where to begin. For example, largely unmentioned by the media, prior tothe latest invasion, 14 Israelis had been killed by mostly homemade rockets fired from Gaza over the last sevenyears as against 5,000 Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks. (Seumas Milne, 'Israel's onslaught on Gaza is a crimethat cannot succeed,' The Guardian, December 30, 2008;www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/30/israel-and-the-palestinians-middle-east)Consider the response of Blair and the Guardian to Israel's mass killing. From Blair there is no longer talk of theneed to send bombs and tanks to save a stricken population (Blair led calls for a ground war against Serbia).Instead:"I think the position is that there are circumstances in which we could get an immediateceasefire and that's what people want to see. I think the circumstances focus very much aroundclear action to cut off the supply of arms and money from the tunnels that go from Egypt intoGaza. I think if there were strong, clear, definitive action on that, that would give us the bestcontext to get an immediate ceasefire and to start to change the situation." (Andrew Sparrow,'Immediate Gaza ceasefire is possible, says Tony Blair,' The Guardian, January 6, 2009;www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/jan/06/israelandthepalestinians-middleeast)No Guardian editorials have proposed a massive military assault on Israel as the only "honorable course for Europeand America". The question has not been asked: "If we do not act at all... what is likely to be Gaza's future?"Instead, the country's "leading liberal newspaper" is sensitive to the perspective of the Israeli killing machine:"The ghost of Israel's humiliation at the hands of Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 hangs over thisenterprise and Israel will want to exorcise it... Israel will judge the success of its operation onthe extent to which it will have depleted Hamas's command structure, as well as its ability tolaunch rockets." (Leader, 'Gaza ground assault: When victory is a hollow word,' The Guardian,January 5, 2008)As we will see, the claim that Israel is working merely to smash "Hamas's command structure" is a classic liberalherring.The Guardian's solution: "There is only one way out of the political trap which Israeli forces are now entering, andthat is an immediate ceasefire." (Ibid.)To be fair, a second leader did contemplate a slap on the wrist:"If Israel presses on regardless, it should face an immediate suspension of all arms from the EU,as Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, proposes." (Leader, 'Gaza: No shelter,' TheGuardian, January 7, 2008)As ever, Israeli politicians claim to have been heroically restraining themselves and their capacity for violence (amanifest source of pride) in the face of endless provocation. And yet, as recently as February-March last year 110Palestinian civilians were killed during 'Operation Winter Heat'. (See our earlier Media Alerts: 'Israel's IllegalAssault On The Gaza "Prison"' March 3, 2008, and 'Israeli Deaths Matter More,' March 11, 2008) This military violence is piled on the staggering economic violence of Israel's blockade of Gaza. Prior to the latest
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offensive, John Ging who runs the Gaza operations of Unrwa, the UN agency that looks after Palestinian refugees,told the BBC last month:"There's one million on food aid, including 750,000 refugees. 80% are below the poverty line,meaning they live on less than $2 a day. Almost 100,000 jobs have gone in the last 18 months,since the total Israeli embargo came in. [Because that included most building materials] $93m ofUnrwa construction projects, medical centres, houses for refugees, all are stopped. 3,200 out of3,500 Gaza businesses have gone down in the siege.""There's no ray of sunlight. It's all going in the wrong direction. It's all well documented andpredictable.""The Quartet [of the US, UN, Russia and the EU] said a new approach was needed for Gaza. Infact there are even stricter sanctions." (BBC online, 'Bowen diary: The days before war,' January10, 2009;http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi /world/middle_east/7822048.stm)During the ceasefire, Israel placed severe restrictions on the number of trucks allowed to bring food, fuel,cooking-gas canisters, spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. Israeli historian,Avi Shlaim, professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, wrote in the Guardian:"It is difficult to see how starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the Israeli side ofthe border. But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment that is strictly forbiddenby international humanitarian law." (Shlaim, 'How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe,'The Guardian, January 7, 2009;http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/ 2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine)He added:"The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's insane offensiveagainst Gaza seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash."It is the sheer cruelty of Israeli oppression that captures the world's imagination. Or, more accurately, defies it.
Targeting Hamas
The corporate media has been happy to echo the claim that Israel is "targeting Hamas" rather than the Palestinianpeople. In reality, the Palestinian people elected Hamas as its democratic government in 2006. And it is thePalestinian people who are paying the price now. The state of the art, US-supplied missiles, bombs and artilleryshells are not being aimed at the regular army targets for which they were designed: tanks, command posts,trenches and bunkers. They are being fired into residential areas in one of the world's most densely-populatedstrips of land.The white phosphorus (WP) shells being used are incendiary airburst weapons designed to incinerate a widetarget area. The weapon has been used by US forces in their infamous "shake 'n' bake" attacks on Iraqi insurgentsin cities such as Fallujah. On the BBC's World News, correspondent Ben Brown said WP shells were being usedmerely to illuminate targets in Gaza. (Brown, BBC World News, January 9)Israel consistently claims that 80 per cent of those killed were Hamas "militants". Al Haq, a Palestinian legalrights group, reports that in fact 80 per cent of Palestinian fatalities have been civilians. According to figurescited by the World Health Organisation, at least 40 per cent have been children. (Jonathan Cook, 'Civilian deathtoll spurs legal action,' The National, January 9, 2009;http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090109/FOREIGN/417838381/1002)Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF) characterised the death toll as reaching "alarming proportions" and indicative of"extreme violence indiscriminately affecting civilians." (http://reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/ TUJA-7N55DU?OpenDocument&rc=3&cc=pse)Claims of careful targeting are hardly credible given that Israeli artillery shells hit three United Nations-runschools being used as refugee centres, killing more than 50 people. The UN had informed the Israeli military thatthe schools were refugee centres - GPS coordinates were provided. Israeli forces knew what they were attackingand they knew the centres were packed with the same families they had previously told to leave their homes toavoid attack.Israel explained that Hamas fighters had been firing from within one of the schools. When the claim becameindefensible, it was quietly withdrawn in "private" briefings to Westerners - a retraction barely reportedanywhere. (http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=s0BRJS6WnMs)The latest claim (Ben Brown, BBC World News, January 11) is that the UN-run school was hit by a stray mortar
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