20 October 2023 12:01 am Views - 823
The aftermath of the Gaza Baptist Hospital carnage
How many Palestinian children should die before the West and its mollycoddled ally, Israel, feel sated to call for a ceasefire? One-third of the more than 3,000 Palestinian casualties in the
If the images of injured children crying in unbearable pain fail to evoke a compassionate response and a call for an immediate ceasefire from United States President Joe Biden, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and other Western leaders who express support for Israel and its war crimes, they are only promoting and celebrating psychopathic behaviour and calling it humane.
At the United Nations Security Council, US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield was seen picking holes in the highly watered-down Brazilian text of a UN resolution calling for a pause in the fighting to enable the passage of humanitarian assistance to the besieged people of Gaza. She vetoed the resolution on the grounds that it had failed to mention Israel’s right to defend itself. In other words, for the US, what is more important than Palestinian children dying, crying in pain, and losing their parents and siblings is a line on Israel’s right to defend itself. She had earlier rejected the Russian text for an immediate ceasefire on the grounds that it had failed to condemn Hamas.
If the US is as humane as it wants the world to believe it is, then it should have presented its version of a UN resolution by calling for an immediate ceasefire while condemning Hamas for its atrocities on October 7 and including Israel’s right to defend itself. The fact that it did not do so clearly indicates that the US does not want Israel to stop killing children in Palestine; it would not mind children dying without medical care, dying of starvation, or suffering from mental trauma of unimaginable magnitude.
There is little surprise in the United States’ insensitivity to children dying because of its actions. After all, it once said the deaths of half a million children in Iraq due to crippling US sanctions, was a price worth paying for.
The pain and agony were also evident in the Israeli civilian deaths that occurred due to the October 7 Hamas attack. But the Western leaders, while mourning Israel’s suffering, do not want to admit that the pain was similar on the Palestinian side, if not much more. What Hamas visited Israel with on October 7 was what Israel has been visiting the Palestinians with for more than seven decades. But those who condemn the Hamas attack as an act of terrorism won’t describe Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinian people as state terrorism. The spin-doctoring continues, and the truth remains a casualty of the war.
The massacre at Gaza’s Al Ahli Baptist Hospital is now being projected in the Western media as a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket, but little or no mention is made of tweets posted by Israeli officials celebrating the hit.
In the aftermath of the hospital attack, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir claimed: “As long as Hamas does not release the hostages in its hands - the only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tonnes of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”
Hananya Naftali, an official who works for hardline Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s digital team posted on X: “BREAKING: Israeli Air Force struck a Hamas terrorist base inside a hospital in Gaza.” The posts were quickly deleted after the war party realised that the magnitude of the carnage—500 deaths—could lead to Israel losing the propaganda war that is being carried out on Israel’s behalf by the so-called independent Western media. If the Palestinian missiles had such devastating firepower, they would have obliterated Israel by now.
The Western media bias was exposed when newspapers and television channels seized on fake news that the Hamas fighters had beheaded 40 children during their raid on October 7. Giving credibility to the story was US President Joe Biden’s statement that he saw such pictures. With a White House disclaimer, it is now clear that the US President will even lie for Israel. The President has no qualms over violating one of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not bear false witness.”
Something is seriously wrong in the world order when the truth is portrayed as falsehood, justice as injustice and the oppressor as the oppressed.
It is becoming as clear as clear could be that the Zionist-controlled Western media do not practice unbiased journalism. It is unbelievably shocking to see the extent to which they will go to twist the facts and garb them with smokescreens.
When the BBC’s World Affairs Correspondent John Simpson defended the BBC’s high-quality independent journalism at the beginning of the latest phase of escalation in the Palestinian suffering which many people mistakenly call ‘the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’, the BBC was, perhaps, rooting for the familiar game of media deception. The modus operandi appears to be that before presenting falsehood as truth, the institution should rev up its credentials for impartiality. Simpson was defending the BBC’s policy of not calling Hamas terrorists, saying it was not the BBC’s job to tell people who to support and who to condemn...
Though Simpson drew widespread criticism for his statement, the BBC has been criticized for deceptive journalism. In the 1920s, historian Patrick Renshaw called the BBC’s precious independence a myth. He said the price of the BBC’s independence was doing what the government wanted done. “[Prime Minister Stanley] Baldwin... saw that if they preserved the BBC’s independence, it would be much easier for them to get their way on important questions and use it to broadcast government propaganda.”
So the name of the game is preserving media freedom to carry out state propaganda. They slavishly do that on behalf of Israel. One wonders whether the West still believes that Israel is a bulwark against Asian barbarism, as claimed by Theodore Herzl, father of Zionism.
Several big names in the Western media are part of the West’s war party. They practise embedded journalism, in which they prostitute the hallowed principles of journalism and produce bastardised news. They went along with the official US lie that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. They never questioned the credibility of such claims that led to the 2003 Iraq War which killed millions of Iraqi people.
Beware of a media group that claims to be independent. Behind this boast, there is a Goebellesian face repeating propaganda and falsehood until their version of the story gains wide acceptance as the truth. With the Western governments toeing a pro-Israeli line and supporting genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip, absent in the so-called independent Western media is the narration that explains the root causes of Palestinian suffering. They will not, for Israel is a Western project that serves the West’s geopolitical and geoeconomic interests.