The past couple of weeks–and in particular the last couple of days–the Israeli Terrorist Forces (ITF) have been working over time to terrorize people in the Nablus area. Their overflights all day long, during which they break the sound barrier, is bad enough. But dropping sound bombs has been added to the daily way they terrorize those of us living in the region. A sound bomb may not have the power to murder, but let me tell you: it definitely has the power to scare one in a similar fashion. Just 30 minutes ago I was teaching my drama class, reading a dialogue between Iago and Othello when the entire classroom, the entire building shook as a result of this sound bomb.
It could be just usual daily terrorist exercises. It could also be heightened to show support for the illegal Israeli settlers who have also been terrorizing Palestinians:
Approximately 100 settlers participated in the attack on the village that followed the incident. Ten Palestinians were injured, windows were smashed, cars overturned, chemicals sprayed and graffiti painted oh Palestinian walls.
One of the settlers who participated in the riots told the Israeli daily paper Haaretz, “It wasn’t exactly our preferred way of spending the Sabbath, but it was what needed to be done.”
“The response at the village was a healthy and good reflex,” another settler told the paper “the absence of these reflexes would show that something was faulty.”
“We, the residents of the Shalhevet neighborhood were those who called out to the men, the women and children of Yithar to go down to the village from where the terrorist came to kill us,” a third settler from the bloc commented, “we initiated this and requested they do it.”
“People forget that this is an enemy who wants to kill us,” he concluded, but “we understand that here.”
Of course all the rhetoric that appears to condemn the illegal Israeli settlers never connects the illegal settlers and the Israeli-sponsored state terrorism (those who drop actual bombs as well as sound bombs) that works in tandem with the settlers. Of course we know that when Israeli behavior is examined by international observers who care about human rights their tendency to behave as war criminals gets exposed, as was the case in Beit Hanoun–though notice how guarded Desmond Tutu’s language is:
On the three-day visit, Tutu and his team visited the house, interviewed the survivors and met others in Gaza, including the senior Hamas figure and former prime minister Ismail Haniyeh. At the time Tutu said he wanted to travel to Israel to hear the Israeli account of events, but he was not permitted.
“In the absence of a well-founded explanation from the Israeli military – who is in sole possession of the relevant facts – the mission must conclude that there is a possibility that the shelling of Beit Hanoun constituted a war crime,” Tutu said in his report to the 47-member council.
He also recommended that Israel pay adequate compensation to the victims “without delay”. His report said “reparation” should also be made to the town of Beit Hanoun itself, and suggested a memorial to the victims that also helped the survivors, and suggested a physiotheraphy clinic as one possibility.
I’m sure the Israelis received such a message from Tutu as if a bomb dropped on them, but it would, of course, be a metaphorical one. And the Zionist state has always done an excellent job of denying, lying, covering up, and creating propaganda to make people believe in their deceitful world view. Israel was created on such mythology and they’ve, unfortunately, done an excellent job in exporting that propagandist mythology. Americans also have a long history of producing propaganda, though they are not always as slick. It’s often easy to tell when one views propaganda films and certainly those Americans who awoke to find their newspaper stuffed with one such film it was like they too had a bomb dropped on them.
Apparently, McCain is responsible for this metaphorical bomb (don’t worry, if elected he’ll be responsible for many more, though it won’t be Americans won’t be suffering):
70 newspapers in swing states have been paid to distribute Obsession this weekend and next, which means not all the DVDs have been delivered yet. Check the list at the end of this post to see if your newspaper is one of them, and let them know how you feel about their participation in this shameless propaganda campaign.)
This week, 28 million copies of a right-wing, terror propaganda DVD are being mailed and bundled in newspaper deliveries to voters in swing states. The 60-minute DVDs, titled Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West, are landing on doorsteps in a campaign coinciding with the 7th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Funding is coming from a New York-based group called the Clarion Fund, a shadowy outfit whose financial backers are unclear.
Given that I’m currently working on a talk about Brigitte Gabriel at a conference next month I knew that I had to check it out. As I suspected she and the other usual suspects were in the “documentary” film (apparently Rush Limbaugh is not aware that documentaries constitute a film genre–if you can bear it you can listen to his interview with the director of Obsession Wayne Kopping). I found all 10 parts of it on Youtube, which I will link to here but not embed so as to to tarnish my blog with their filth. You may click this link for the first episode, and then follow the links on the right-hand side of the screen for the other episodes. If you are fasting and are a smoker, I recommend waiting until you can have a cigarette if you are actually going to waste 60 minutes of your life for this deeply offensive discourse.
But for those of you can not bear the pain and suffering of this let me share some highlights for you. First, this film was produced in 2005, and has never had a proper film distributor (hence the political propaganda route now) because it is so obviously a sick propaganda film. Like most propaganda films we see no context, many speeches or events taken out of context, misrepresentations, and mistranslations. In order to help make such ahistorical, deeply politicized and deceptive rhetoric easier for Americans to swallow, the film director trots out the usual list of collaborators who profit off of selling their Arab and Muslim brethren down the river. Gabriel was one such feature of the film. As was Nonie Darwish who comes with the tagline, “daughter of Shahid (Martyr).” Darwish is famous for creating the deeply offensive “Arabs for Israel” organization. There is also Khaled Abu Toameh, a Palestinian journalist who writes for the right-wing Israeli newspaper the Jerusalem Post. On the side, he also profits from working with hard-core Zionists by spewing propaganda around the U.S. about Palestinians and Muslims. There is also Walid Shoebat a man who appears with the tagline beneath his name, “Former PLO Terrorist.” These are the so-called native informants who appear throughout the film. These people have allowed themselves to either be brainwashed so fully or to be seduced by their 15 minutes of fame, power, money. Or maybe a combination of the two. But there are more dangerous people in the movie, also the usual voices of distortion of facts, outright lies, and dangerous propaganda. This cast of characters includes Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, and Itamar Marcus. Of these, the last one is probably the least well known in the U.S., but I find him the most dangerous. He lives in the illegal Israeli settlement of Efrat, just above Deheishe refugee camp in Beit Lahem. He is responsible for the propaganda machine that is called Palestine Media Watch, and is most dangerous because Marcus has a direct line of communication with Hillary Clinton; all of her propaganda comes directly from this illegal settler, in this illegal settlement.
What is most disturbing about the film is the way it is being distributed. Because I fear that it will feed into American ignorance and fear quite easily. Otherwise nothing is really new here. Same old propaganda, same old mythology. Here are some quotes from the film to give you an idea about the level of deceit and myth-making:
Walid Shoebat, “Former PLO Terrorist,” People think about it, yes, jihad does mean self-struggle, struggle within. But so does mein kampf. Mein kampf means my struggle. But what struggle? Nazism had a struggle with what? What did the jews do to in Nazi Germany? Jihad is being used in the Middle East as struggle with the Jewish people. Struggle with the West.
Itamar Marcus: There were numerous examples in American academia and media, after 9/11, that placed the blame of 9/11 on American imperialism around the world….It is distracting from the source of the problem which is an ideology which wants to destroy the West….If you want to get people to fight, you have to get people to think there is a threat and to think they are in danger.
Brigitte Gabriel: Hamas has the largest infrastructure of all terrorist organizations on American soil today.
Nonie Darwish: America has to wake up because we’ve been strangling ourselves with our political correctness.
Steve Emerson: There is tremendous deception in terms of saying one thing publicly and another thing privately. Yassir Arafat was obviously the master of this dual agenda. In terms of openly supporting pluralism, nonviolence, or condemning terrorism and then secretly, behind closed doors, supporting it.
I know that 9/11 killed irony in the U.S., but when I hear Marcus spewing that crap it is unbelievable to me that a) he can so easily hide a very well documented history of U.S. global imperialism that has everything to do with “why they hate us” (the annoying question Gabriel always whines about). A quick look at Venezuela, Bolivia, Honduras, El Salvador, etc. right now will give you a brief glimpse into an answer that has nothing to do with Islam. But what’s more is Marcus’ ability to say with a straight face that it is an Islamic ideology wanting to destroy the West when actions over the past 7 years (including McCain’s rhetoric and actions, by the way) show the opposite. It is the U.S. actively working to destroy the Arab and Muslim world. There is an inherently anti-Islamic and anti-Arab policy in the U.S. that actively hurts people who are–or sometimes who just look like–Muslims or Arabs. But then here is the kicker: Marcus gives away his modus operandi when he makes it clear that getting people ready to fight takes the work of helping them to see the danger. What, if not that, is the purpose of this film? Am I the only one who can see this irony here?
But what is the most annoying, disturbing, though typical and expected element of the movie is its incessant harping on distorted facts about the so-called relationship between Palestine and Nazi Germany. I get so tired of hearing this argument for so many reasons. Not the least of which even if Hajj Amin Al Husseini’s relationship with Hitler was as extensive as the Zionists make it out to be, he does not represent all Palestinians–not then, not now. Therefore, by trotting him out as Zionists love to do, they stereotype all Palestinians (though in this film they are working to stereotype all Muslims) as working in the same ideology as the Nazi regime. At least half of this movie devotes itself to drawing a link between Hitler’s desire for world domination and Islam’s desire for the same. They are portrayed as extensions of one another. They even trot out a former Hitler Youth Officer who goes on and on about how Islam and Nazism are one in the same.
I’ve got one thing to say about this: only the Israelis have called for an all-out Shoah on Palestinians in Gaza. While their methods may not be the same, their end result is–and this has been Zionism’s project all along: ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the land. Muslims have not done this to Jews; Arabs have not done this to Jews. Europeans killed Jews, but not people in this region. Distorting facts, especially when they are so easily identifiable does nothing other than create more propaganda, more hatred, and more suffering.
body on the line 