- The Day will come, hopefully soon, when everyone, and
not just those watching the Palestinian-Israeli conflict up close, will
look back to this time with utter astonishment and disbelief and ask: Why
was the American media totally silent over Israeli war crimes against Palestinian
children? Why didn't they rise up, through their editorials and their on-air
commentaries, with disgust and indignation over Israel's policy of killing
children and innocent civilians as a tactic to pressure Palestinians to
turn against their leadership?
-
- When such a day comes, will editors be able to legitimately
plead ignorance? Unlikely. The evidence has been overwhelming, and everywhere:
from day one of this Intifada, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
Peace Now, Gush Shalom, B'tselem, along with the United Nations Human Rights
Commission, and many, many other groups, have been denouncing the Israeli
army's policy of shooting at children to kill.
-
- As far back as December 2000, only three months after
the outbreak of the Intifada, Amnesty International concluded that: "For
a force trained in policing riots and equipped and prepared for stone throwers,
neither stones nor petrol bombs should be lethal. Therefore there should
be no need for the use of firearms, let alone lethal force, against stone
throwers."
-
- And yet, the killing and maiming has continued, unabated,
to the tune of 80 Palestinian children younger than 15 and 197 below the
age of 18, and tens of thousands of wounded, while the media have stood
by in utter silence. Indeed, not one editorial in any of the main media
outlets that I can remember since the outbreak of the Intifada a year and
a half ago has been published that stated, unambiguously or otherwise,
that although Israel has a right to defend itself, it has no right to kill
and maim children and innocent civilians as a pressure tactic; as a policy.
Keeping to a long-standing tradition of ignoring what human rights organisations
have to say (unless they are targeting America's official "enemies"),
the US mainstream media have decided to simply look the other way.
-
- But then reports of such atrocities began to appear in
the mainstream media itself, under the very noses of editorial writers.
Last October, for instance, in a gripping article by New York Times reporter
Chris Hedges, published in the October issue of Harper's magazine, we read
about the Israeli army's routine practice of inciting Palestinian children
and then shooting them to kill. Hedges also appeared on NPR's Fresh Air
on Oct. 30, 2001, where he told millions of listeners the following: "I've
seen death squads kill families in Algeria or El Salvador. But I'd never
seen soldiers bait or taunt kids like this and then shoot them for sport.
It was ; I just ; even now, I find it almost inconceivable. And I went
back every day, and every day it was the same."
-
- Then came the eyewitness accounts of Israeli soldiers
who are now refusing to serve in the occupied territories, citing their
objection to "illegal orders" for unleashing death and violence
against civilians. In their statements, the soldiers state: "We, combat
officers and soldiers who have served the state of Israel for long weeks
every year... were issued commands and directives that had nothing to do
with the security of our country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating
our control over the Palestinian people; we, whose eyes have seen the bloody
toll this occupation exacts from both sides; we shall not continue to fight
beyond the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate
an entire people."
-
- And lately, a heated, passionate debate within Israel
itself is raging about Israel's crimes against civilians. In a Feb. 10
piece in Israel's Haaretz newspaper, veteran journalist Gideon Levy wrote
bitterly that "the Israeli army has totally shaken off any and all
moral responsibility for the killing of these children", noting that
"in not one of these cases did the Israeli army spokesman take the
trouble to do the minimum human necessary thing " to express sorrow
at the death of the children. The only conclusion is that the Israeli army
is not sorry about their killing. That is the message to those who did
the killing and to the families of those who were killed. No less grave,
the Israeli army did not even contemplate investigating the circumstances
of the deaths!.
-
- Levy goes on to observe: "The fact is that not everything
is permitted. When the Israeli army wanted to prevent immoral and illegal
actions, it was able to do so. There are two offences that Israeli army
soldiers have rarely committed during the years of the occupation ; sexual
harassment and looting."
-
- As is well known, Israel cannot engage in any atrocities
if the government of the United States decides that it must stop. And the
US government will not tolerate such atrocities if a chorus of outrage
were raised by the US media. If the New York Times, the Washington Post,
the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, the USA Today, the
LA Times, and other papers, along with commentators on NPR, CNN, MSNBC
and other media outlets, started publishing and airing unambiguous condemnations
of Israel's policy of killing children, you can bet that the US administration
will ensure that such killing stops at once before the outcry against Israel
spirals out of control ; and anything spiralling out of control is the
thing the US (and any government) fears the most. (A campaign of outcries
against US moves to do as they please with the Taleban and Al Qaeda "detainees",
with total disregard to the Geneva Conventions, certainly has pressured
the administration to begin worrying at least about seeming to respect
international law.)
-
- In other words, the moral responsibility of the US media
is clear and direct: the chain from silence to bullet is present, real,
indisputable and straightforward, and no matter how they choose to justify
this silence, members of the US media cannot shirk that responsibility
and maintain any claim to moral integrity.
-
- Members of the US media need to take a clear stand against
the illegal practices of the Israeli army now, before the train of history
passes them and the ignominy of having stood silent while crimes against
humanity were committed forever blots their already soiled record on this
unending tragedy; a tragedy in whose prolonged agony they must sadly accept
a share of responsibility.
-
- The writer is president of Palestine Media Watch http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020221180802450
|
