“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players….”
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Taking turns to screw up
Three years ago I wrote this post , decrying the election by the Palestinians of Hamas as the governing party. I was sadly accurate about Hamas's endorsement of violence and about Israel's increased willingness to use military interventions...not that it was much forecasting to be done, it was the only possible scenario.
This time around, the clusterfuck comes from the Israeli side...For appetizers, Likud - with its Nutty Benny - are elected to lead the country; for mains - Armageddon Avigdor Lieberman is to be the foreign minister. By all means, let's not have deserts on this one.
Since I began travelling more around the world, I increasingly found the cliché that "every country has the government it deserves" to be quite true, with few notably exceptions of mad dictatorships.
It’s sad to think what these elections say about today’s Israel.
I've meant to post the video for a while now; it's an excellent short film in which my brother, Erwin, has the lead role. Given that it recently won the prize for Best Short Film at L'Alternativa (Barcelona Independent Film Festival), I figured it's the right moment to put it up.
It takes 20 minutes and it's got English subtitles (not fully accurate, but you'll understand the story).
I'm just watching a Romanian news channel, where mr A. Jaber - representative of the Palestinian community in Romania is a guest speaker.
While talking about the alleged ill-intent and about the impact on civilian population of the current Israeli offensive in Gaza, he points that - I quote: "If Israel really wanted to destroy Hamas, all they should do is turn off the water and gas supply for the Gaza population and Hamas would be gone in few weeks. "
????? Am I missing something? Wouldn't that be an actual crime against all the people in Gaza? Is this better than trying to destroy the terror infrastructure built by Hamas across the territory, under people's houses, under University, under Mosques?
Is this what a Palestinian suggests be done to its people - leave them all without gas and water? The Likud party might want to recruit this fellow.
Do you want to learn the full truth about the Jews?
tatatata...look no further than www.jewwatch.com ....
Now, tell me this: how would you react if one of your best friends is reading this website and when you point out it's a lot of hateful garbage, he asks - albeit in different words - " how can you prove that? "
How do you begin? Do you begin at all? How do you deconstruct a monstrous library of lies put under the hideous tagline of 'scholarly research'? How, when I cannot even begin to understand what drives the people that created it to such levels of insanity?
It was probably the first time in my life when I just couldn't answer a question regarding Jewish identity and history. But I began to see more clearly how easy anti-Semitism can be spread, by simply carrying the message long and loud enough, through as many channels as possible, and, of more recent trend, also with an 'honest interest for scientific accuracy' makeup('oh, he's playing the anti-Semitism card, like they always do when asked uncomfortable questions'...raise your hand if you just thought that while reading the last sentence).
I've been making this point to some of my friends for a while now, but today i have no doubt whatsoever: BBC is one of the most bias, one-sided, opinionated global media there is! Compared to BBC’s, even Al Jazeera's coverage of Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems as neutral as Pierluigi Colina' refereeing in a Champions League final.
If you spend some time on their website, you'll notice the pattern:
- any article that portrays either the suffering of the Gaza people (which I am NOT debating, as it's beyond doubt that they live in miserable conditions) or an attack of the Israeli army, gets full-day coverage - as the front article plus 3-4 other links in the page.
- any article that is discussing the plight of Israeli citizens continuously under rocket attacks (alas, BBC needs to keep the appearance of objectivity) is tucked away in maximum one of the subsections AND
- any article of this second type will no later than paragraph 2 (max3) immediately draw parallels with the problems in Gaza. The reciprocal never happens: article about the Palestinian suffering have, at the most, the last sentence as a reference to the Israeli side.
There's no point providing examples on the above points in this post, because any single example doesn't come as solid enough to prove the point. BUT, if you do want to test this, observe BBC's coverage on a longer period of time. It will come screaming in your face!
