Monday, August 25, 2014

Palestine/Israel: It's Colonialism, Stupid

As I've indicated countless times already on this blog, the Palestine/Israel conflict separates the sheep from the goats like no other issue. It's been around now for almost 100 years (which I compute from the Balfour Declaration of 1917 on), oceans of ink have been spilt on reporting it in that time, and entire libraries could be stocked merely with the books written on it.

IOW, there are no excuses for not have a basic understanding of the issue, particularly on the part of those who make a buck commenting on the affairs of our time.

So what do I find in yesterday's Sun-Herald:

"Remove questions of God from Israel and Gaza and you're left with two people who have more in common than they care to realise."  (Killing in God's name is beyond belief, Sam de Brito)

Yet another Fairfax columnist recycling the dumbest of all the zombie myths that bedevil an understanding of this conflict: It's all about religion.

The terrible irony, of course, is that journalists like Mike Carlton and Glen Le Lievre, who 'get' that the conflict is a struggle over land between indigenous Palestinian Arabs and non-indigenous European colons (aka Zionist settlers), are hounded and smeared, while boofheads like de Brito and Moir, to name but two, who cluelessly peddle zombie myths about the conflict never come under attack - except, of course, on this little blog.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The God bit is just a cop-out and entirely incidental, just as in the colonization of any country by land hungry jingoists.

Imagine if apologists trotted out the religion defense as a justification for colonialism anywhere apart from Palestine.

No doubt the God defense will be dusted off and given another run around the paddock in Tony Abbott's new 'community engagement' brainwashing scheme for Arabic youth. It would be a joke if it didn't cost the taxpayer over twelve million dollars to implement.

The idea that young people of Arabic descent are 'radicalized' by a variety of evil influences, including the internet and travel, ignore events as presented in news footage on TV.

Anyone can see the carnage and war crimes visited on the Palestinian people on a daily basis simply by watching the news.This is despite the biased commentary, which is more often than not, counter intuitive to the actual events.

I cant wait to read the syllabus for the 'community engagement' scheme, but I can imagine what is included and what is left out.

Left unmentioned will be any mention of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, the contradictory Hussein-McMahon correspondence or the infamous Balfour Declaration.

Be very afraid of ignorance and deceit.