Hamas’ seemingly surprising escape from Gaza, the world’s largest gulag, and incursion into the land of its occupiers does not excuse Hamas’ criminal attacks, hostage-takings and murders in Israel. Moreover, Hamas has done a great disservice to the Palestinian cause, as even more people will turn away from the oppressed Palestinians because of Hamas’ unjustified, incredibly brutal actions. But the worst thing for millions of innocent Palestinians will be the bloody, indiscriminate revenge of the Netanyahu regime. It is a welcome opportunity that the Hamas radicals are handing to the opposite radicals of the apartheid regime on a silver platter to slaughter as many of the hated Arabs as possible or to expel them from their land and racially “cleanse” it.
As usual, Western politicians and media strongly condemn Palestinian terrorist acts and show solidarity with Israel, and instead of denouncing its state terrorism, they even support it. And only exceptionally do voices in the West, such as Jewish Voice for Peace, shed light on the background of Palestinian distress and anger:
“For 16 years, the Israeli government has suffocated Palestinians in Gaza under a draconian air, sea and land military blockade, imprisoning and starving two million people and denying them medical aid. The Israeli government routinely massacres Palestinians in Gaza; ten-year-old’s who live in Gaza have already been traumatized by seven major bombing campaigns in their short lives.
For 75 years, the Israeli government has maintained a military occupation over Palestinians, operating an apartheid regime. Palestinian children are dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids by Israeli soldiers and held without charge in Israeli military prisons. Palestinians homes are torched by mobs of Israeli settlers, or destroyed by the Israeli army. Entire Palestinian villages are forced to flee, abandoning the homes and orchards and land that were in their family for generations”. There is no Palestinian family that has not been affected by Israeli discrimination, land theft or deadly violence. That this leads to boundless hatred is shown by the case of the Hamas military leader, who also “lost loved ones to Israeli violence – an infant son, a three-year-old daughter and his wife.”
Did the Netanyahu regime deliberately allow the brutal attack to create an excuse to deal a devastating blow to the Palestinians? The question is not far-fetched, for nowhere else in the world is there such a total surveillance state as in Gaza, where Israel monitors every inch of ground with satellites and drones, where homes, businesses and schools are bugged like nowhere else, where every phone call, e-mail and other message is checked, and where Israel has recruited scores of spies inside and outside Hamas. The fact that the Hamas operation, which was similar to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, albeit on a much smaller scale, required many months of preparation and involved and informed many people should have apparently gone undetected by the all-powerful Israeli security and surveillance state is indeed hard to believe.
The White House, other Western politicians and the mainstream media immediately condemned Hamas’ attack, and called it, like in the case of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “unprovoked”, again deliberately blanking out context and history of the conflict.
Few journalists dare to challenge the official narrative. One of them is the intrepid Allan MacLeod, who tweeted the following post with pictures:
If you’re wondering why Palestinians are rising up all of a sudden, it’s probably got a lot to do with this:
Not only did the mainstream media fail to provide any insight into the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but social media immediately exploded with highly emotional horror stories about Hamas, including fake photos and videos.
Just like Hamas’ alleged surprise invasion of Israel, this is no coincidence. MacLeod uncovered a network of hundreds of “former” Israeli spies and operatives who have secured jobs at top tech and social media companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. His bombshell investigation is here.
Of “valuable” and “worthless” people, in western reporting
Allow me to take a brief detour to Sudan, where a recent airstrike on Darfur claimed the lives of at least 40 civilians. The Sudanese army carried out artillery attacks that killed at least 32 civilians. Sudan has more than 7 million displaced people. It is estimated that 400,000 people have died there as a result of the violence as of 2019. As many as 10,000 people have died in recent warfare.
It goes without saying that every Israeli (and Palestinian) killed is one too many. So why does the media only report on deaths in Israel and so little on those in Sudan? Unlike Israel, life in Sudan is, if I may say so, cheap. As cheaply as in Yemen, where the Western allies have been waging one of the dirtiest and most hideous wars of modern times with Western weapons for years.
This, of course, does not excuse Hamas’s (and Israel’s) atrocities. Is it whatsaboutism, the obfuscating mention of additional wrongdoings to deflect attention from wrongdoings?
No, but it does serve to highlight the media’s seemingly arbitrary decision to focus on certain world events that have great resonance while largely ignoring others that they are indifferent to.