Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
As the Israeli government under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert escalates and
widens its aggression against the Palestinians and Lebanese, the U.S.
government and controlled media are silent in the face of egregious Israeli
war crimes.
As Israeli fighter jets bomb defenseless civilians and infrastructure in
the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, the U.S. government and mainstream media refuse to
criticize the Israeli aggression. The controlled press has repeated ad nauseam
the nonsensical lie that the blatantly illegal actions of the Israeli
government against the Palestinian people and their elected government have
been taken to secure the release of one captured Israeli soldier.
Israeli and Jewish newspapers, on the other hand, are much more critical
and honest about the nature of the Israeli aggression.
Ori Nir, for example, writing in The Forward, a leading Jewish newspaper,
wrote: "The Bush administration appears to have dropped any objections to
Israeli efforts to topple the Palestinian Authority's democratically elected
Hamas government," in a July 7 article titled "U.S. Seen Backing Israeli Moves
To Topple Hamas."
So much for the Bush axiom that democracies don't wage war against other
democracies.
The criticism in the Israeli press was even more direct and honest. Gideon
Levy of the Israeli daily Ha'aretz called Israel's aggression an act of state
terror:
The "rolling operation" and bombing of Gaza, Levy wrote in his recent
article "The Black Flag," is "first and foremost blatantly illegitimate.
"It is not legitimate to cut off 750,000 people from electricity," Levy
wrote. "It is not legitimate to call on 20,000 people to run from their homes
and turn their towns into ghost towns. It is not legitimate to penetrate
Syria's airspace. It is not legitimate to kidnap half a government and a
quarter of a parliament.
"A state that takes such steps is no longer distinguishable from a terror
organization," Levy, a well-known Israeli journalist wrote. "The legitimate
basis for the IDF's operation was stripped away the moment it began. It's no
accident that nobody mentions the day before the attack on the Kerem Shalom
fort, when the IDF kidnapped two civilians, a doctor and his brother, from
their home in Gaza. The difference between us and them? We kidnapped civilians
and they captured a soldier, we are a state and they are a terror
organization.
"How ridiculously pathetic [Israeli Maj. Gen.] Amos Gilad sounds when he
says that the capture of Shalit was 'illegitimate and illegal,' unlike when
the IDF grabs civilians from their homes. How can a senior official in the
defense ministry claim that 'the head of the snake' is in Damascus, when the
IDF uses the exact same methods?
"What we are doing now in Gaza has nothing to do with freeing him [Gilad
Shalit]. It is a wide scale act of vengeance, the kind that the IDF and Shin
Bet have wanted to conduct for some time," Levy wrote.
"We are bombing and shelling, darkening and destroying, imposing a siege
and kidnapping like the worst of terrorists and nobody breaks the silence to
ask, what the hell for, and according to what right?"
Reproduced from
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