<A
HREF="http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020221180802450";>http://palestinechronicle.com/article.php?story=20020221180802450</A>
>From silence to the bullet
Thursday, February 21 2002 @ 06:08 PM GMT
Members of the US media need to take a clear stand against the illegal
practices of the Israeli army now, before the train of history passes them
and the ignominy of having stood silent while crimes against humanity were
committed
By Ahmed Bouzid for PalestineChronicle.com
The Day will come, hopefully soon, when everyone, and not just those
watching the Palestinian-Israeli conflict up close, will look back to this
time with utter astonishment and disbelief and ask: Why was the American
media totally silent over Israeli war crimes against Palestinian children?
Why didn't they rise up, through their editorials and their on-air
commentaries, with disgust and indignation over Israel's policy of killing
children and innocent civilians as a tactic to pressure Palestinians to
turn against their leadership?
When such a day comes, will editors be able to legitimately plead
ignorance? Unlikely. The evidence has been overwhelming, and everywhere:
from day one of this Intifada, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch,
Peace Now, Gush Shalom, B'tselem, along with the United Nations Human
Rights Commission, and many, many other groups, have been denouncing the
Israeli army's policy of shooting at children to kill.
As far back as December 2000, only three months after the outbreak of the
Intifada, Amnesty International concluded that: “For a force trained in
policing riots and equipped and prepared for stone throwers, neither
stones nor petrol bombs should be lethal. Therefore there should be no
need for the use of firearms, let alone lethal force, against stone
throwers.”
And yet, the killing and maiming has continued, unabated, to the tune of
80 Palestinian children younger than 15 and 197 below the age of 18, and
tens of thousands of wounded, while the media have stood by in utter
silence. Indeed, not one editorial in any of the main media outlets that I
can remember since the outbreak of the Intifada a year and a half ago has
been published that stated, unambiguously or otherwise, that although
Israel has a right to defend itself, it has no right to kill and maim
children and innocent civilians as a pressure tactic; as a policy. Keeping
to a long-standing tradition of ignoring what human rights organisations
have to say (unless they are targeting America's official “enemies”),
the US mainstream media have decided to simply look the other way.
But then reports of such atrocities began to appear in the mainstream
media itself, under the very noses of editorial writers. Last October, for
instance, in a gripping article by New York Times reporter Chris Hedges,
published in the October issue of Harper's magazine, we read about the
Israeli army's routine practice of inciting Palestinian children and then
shooting them to kill. Hedges also appeared on NPR's Fresh Air on Oct. 30,
2001, where he told millions of listeners the following: “I've seen
death squads kill families in Algeria or El Salvador. But I'd never seen
soldiers bait or taunt kids like this and then shoot them for sport. It
was — I just — even now, I find it almost inconceivable. And I went
back every day, and every day it was the same.”
Then came the eyewitness accounts of Israeli soldiers who are now refusing
to serve in the occupied territories, citing their objection to “illegal
orders” for unleashing death and violence against civilians. In their
statements, the soldiers state: “We, combat officers and soldiers who
have served the state of Israel for long weeks every year... were issued
commands and directives that had nothing to do with the security of our
country, and that had the sole purpose of perpetuating our control over
the Palestinian people; we, whose eyes have seen the bloody toll this
occupation exacts from both sides; we shall not continue to fight beyond
the 1967 borders in order to dominate, expel, starve and humiliate an
entire people.”
And lately, a heated, passionate debate within Israel itself is raging
about Israel's crimes against civilians. In a Feb. 10 piece in Israel's
Haaretz newspaper, veteran journalist Gideon Levy wrote bitterly that
“the Israeli army has totally shaken off any and all moral
responsibility for the killing of these children”, noting that “in not
one of these cases did the Israeli army spokesman take the trouble to do
the minimum human necessary thing — to express sorrow at the death of
the children. The only conclusion is that the Israeli army is not sorry
about their killing. That is the message to those who did the killing and
to the families of those who were killed. No less grave, the Israeli army
did not even contemplate investigating the circumstances of the deaths”.
Levy goes on to observe: “The fact is that not everything is permitted.
When the Israeli army wanted to prevent immoral and illegal actions, it
was able to do so. There are two offences that Israeli army soldiers have
rarely committed during the years of the occupation — sexual harassment
and looting.”
As is well known, Israel cannot engage in any atrocities if the government
of the United States decides that it must stop. And the US government will
not tolerate such atrocities if a chorus of outrage were raised by the US
media. If the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Philadelphia
Inquirer, the Wall Street Journal, the USA Today, the LA Times, and other
papers, along with commentators on NPR, CNN, MSNBC and other media
outlets, started publishing and airing unambiguous condemnations of
Israel's policy of killing children, you can bet that the US
administration will ensure that such killing stops at once before the
outcry against Israel spirals out of control — and anything spiralling
out of control is the thing the US (and any government) fears the most. (A
campaign of outcries against US moves to do as they please with the
Taleban and Al Qaeda “detainees”, with total disregard to the Geneva
Conventions, certainly has pressured the administration to begin worrying
at least about seeming to respect international law.)
In other words, the moral responsibility of the US media is clear and
direct: the chain from silence to bullet is present, real, indisputable
and straightforward, and no matter how they choose to justify this
silence, members of the US media cannot shirk that responsibility and
maintain any claim to moral integrity.
Members of the US media need to take a clear stand against the illegal
practices of the Israeli army now, before the train of history passes them
and the ignominy of having stood silent while crimes against humanity were
committed forever blots their already soiled record on this unending
tragedy; a tragedy in whose prolonged agony they must sadly accept a
share of responsibility.
