[Peace-discuss] Fwd: Chris Hedges: Why Israel Lies
David Johnson via Peace-discuss
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
Wed Aug 6 18:38:55 EDT 2014
Chris Hedges: Why Israel Lies
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Educate! <http://www.popularresistance.org/category/educate/> Chris
Hedges <http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/chris-hedges/>, Israel
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/israel/>, Palestine
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/palestine/>, Propaganda
<http://www.popularresistance.org/tag/propaganda/>
By Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
<http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/why_israel_lies_20140803>
August 5th, 2014
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/Palestinians evacuate a survivor of an Israeli airstrike that hit a
family building Sunday in Rafah, in southern Gaza. AP/Eyad Baba/
All governments lie, as I.F. Stone
<http://www.ifstone.org/biography-refuted.php> pointed out, including
Israel and Hamas. But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies
that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform
the truth; it inverts it. It routinely paints a picture for the outside
world that is diametrically opposed to reality. And all of us reporters
who have covered the occupied territories have run into Israel's
Alice-in-Wonderland narratives, which we dutifully insert into our
stories---required under the rules of American journalism---although we
know they are untrue.
I saw small boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza
refugee camp of Khan Younis. The soldiers swore at the boys in Arabic
over the loudspeakers of their armored jeep. The boys, about 10 years
old, then threw stones at an Israeli vehicle and the soldiers opened
fire, killing some, wounding others. I was present more than once as
Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such
incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become /children caught in
crossfire./ I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron
fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City. I saw the
corpses of the victims, including children. This became /a surgical
strike on a bomb-making factory./ I have watched Israel demolish homes
and entire apartment blocks to create wide buffer zones between the
Palestinians and the Israeli troops that ring Gaza. I have interviewed
the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters
erected in the rubble. The destruction becomes /the demolition of the
homes of terrorists./ I have stood in the remains of schools---Israel
struck two United Nations schools in the last six days, causing at least
10 fatalities
<http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/aug/03/israel-air-strike-un-school-gaza-rafah>
at one in Rafah on Sunday and at least 19
<http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/07/gaza-un-school-hit-201473041918975321.html>
at one in the Jebaliya refugee camp Wednesday---as well as medical
clinics and mosques. I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or
mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths, or that
the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites. I,
along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have
never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as "human shields."
There is a perverted logic to Israel's repeated use of the Big
Lie---/Große Lüge/---the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and
Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions
Israel seeks to elicit---racism among its supporters and terror among
its victims.
By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that
indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis
are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman
monsters. The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a
clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on
one side and Islamic barbarism on the other. And in the uncommon cases
when news of atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames
the destruction and casualties on Hamas.
George Orwell in his novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" called this form of
propaganda doublethink. Doublethink uses "logic against logic" and
"repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it." The Big Lie does not
allow for the nuances and contradictions that can plague conscience. It
is a state-orchestrated response to the dilemma of cognitive dissonance.
The Big Lie permits no gray zones. The world is black and white, good
and evil, righteous and unrighteous. The Big Lie allows believers to
take comfort---a comfort they are desperately seeking---in their own
moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.
The Big Lie, as the father of American public relations, Edward Bernays,
wrote, is limited only by the propagandist's capacity to fathom and
harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology. And since
most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth, a
truth that would force them to examine their own racism and
self-delusions about Zionist and Western moral superiority, like packs
of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli
government. The Big Lie always finds fertile soil in what Bernays called
the "logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence." All effective
propaganda, Bernays wrote, targets and builds upon these irrational
"psychological habits."
This is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational
becomes rational. It is one where, as Gustave Le Bon noted in "The
Crowd: A Study of the Public Mind," those who supply the masses with the
illusions they crave become their master, and "whoever attempts to
destroy their illusions is always their victim." This irrationality
explains why the reaction of Israeli supporters to those who have the
courage to speak the truth---Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky,
Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé,
Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss---is so rabid. That so many of these
voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who
are among Israel's cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.
But the Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message
to Gaza's Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings,
clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with
schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 1,650 deaths since this
assault began---most of the victims women and children---and who have
seen 400,000 people displaced from their homes. The Big Lie makes it
clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign
of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions.
The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells
the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever
it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant.
There will never, the Palestinians understand from the Big Lie, be an
acknowledgement of reality by the Israeli leadership.
The Israel Defense Forces website
<http://www.idfblog.com/blog/2014/08/01/hamas-holy-places-in-gaza-as-terrorist-facilities/>
is replete with this black propaganda. "Hamas exploits the IDF's
sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy
sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in
mosques," the IDF site reads. "In Hamas' world, hospitals are command
centers, ambulances are transport vehicles, and medics are human
shields," the site insists.
"... [Israeli] officers are tasked with an enormous responsibility: to
protect Palestinian civilians on the ground, no matter how difficult
that may be," the site assures its viewers. And the IDF site provides
this quote from a drone operator identified as Lt. Or. "I have
personally seen rockets fired at Israel from hospitals and schools, but
we couldn't strike back because of civilians nearby. In one instance, we
acquired a target but we saw that there were children in the area. We
waited around, and when they didn't leave we were forced to abort a
strike on an important target."
Israel's ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of
his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel
that the Israeli army should be given the "Nobel Peace Prize ... a
Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint."
The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope
for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in
truth and reality. While, as Hannah Arendt
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/arendt/> pointed out, the ancient and
modern sophists sought to win an argument at the expense of the truth,
those who wield the Big Lie "want a more lasting victory at the expense
of reality." The old sophists, she said, "destroyed the dignity of human
thought." Those who resort to the Big Lie "destroy the dignity of human
action." The result, Arendt warned, is that "history itself is
destroyed, and its comprehensibility." And when facts no longer matter,
when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people
foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of
information. The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it
is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the
brutish language of violence. And when oppressed people are addressed
only through violence they will answer only through violence.
Related Posts:
* Israel Attack On Gaza Founded On Lies Upon Lies
<http://www.popularresistance.org/israel-attack-on-gaza-founded-on-lies-upon-lies/>July
10, 2014
* Chris Hedges And Noam Chomsky (3/3)
<http://www.popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-and-noam-chomsky-33/>June
21, 2014
* Chris Hedges: The Power of Imagination
<http://www.popularresistance.org/chris-hedges-the-power-of-imagination/>May
13, 2014
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