Robert Fisk's World: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons

Robert Fisk's World: Wherever I go, I hear the same tired Middle East comparisons

www.independent.co.uk

It all depends where you live. That was the geography of Israel's propaganda, designed to demonstrate that we softies – we little baby-coddling liberals living in our secure Western homes – don't realise the horror of 12 (now 20) Israeli deaths in 10 years and thousands of rockets and the unimaginable trauma and stress of living near Gaza. Forget the 600 Palestinian dead; travelling on both sides of the Atlantic these past couple of weeks has been an instructive – not to say weirdly repetitive – experience.

Here's how it goes. I was in Toronto when I opened the right-wing National Post and found Lorne Gunter trying to explain to readers what it felt like to come under Palestinian rocket attack. "Suppose you lived in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills," writes Gunter, "and people from the suburb of Scarborough – about 10 kilometres away – were firing as many as 100 rockets a day into your yard, your kid's school, the strip mall down the street and your dentist's office..."

(visit the link for the full news article)

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[edit on 10/1/2009 by Mirthful Me]

It seems that zionist in most Western countries are coordinating their justifications for the massacre in Gaza. It is interesting to note that they are in the invidious position of being in favour of a powerful military attacking the largest refugee camp on the planet.

To make up the ground lost to the juxtaposition of a regional superpower laying siege to an occupied people long subjected to a policy of brutality and blockades, Israeli apologists in the West talk up of their horrors of having to face home made rockets landing hundreds of kilometres from where they vacationed in Israel one summer.

www.independent.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

We're all seeing the same thing.
People telling us to feel sorry for the 20 Israelis that died in 10 years...

Meanwhile there's over 800 (his article was likely written a day or so ago.) dead Palestinians, (over 200 dead Palestinian children!)... but never mind them, they don't count, feel sorry for the handful of dead Israelis.

It's pretty sickening.

I'm sorry, but I cannot sympathize for a nation that kills over 200 children in little over a week in response to losing only 20 of their people in 10 years.


Being Israeli doesn't give you some magical get out of jail free card when it comes to war crimes.
You have to answer to the same international laws the rest of us do... no matter what happened to your grandparents in the 1930's-1940's.



If my belief that Israel should be punished equally as if it were any other nation makes me an anti-Semitic... then I am PROUD to be one!

[edit on 10-1-2009 by johnsky]

why do they keep lying and saying gaza is a refugee camp?.. try google earth it looks like any normal western city ... as for whom to blame look no further than hamas....

[edit on 10-1-2009 by fatdad]

reply to post by masonwatcher


great article. Robert Fisk always tells as it is... i tend to call him the ron paul of the media world. Only with one difference, Fisk has spent his life watching the middle east and south asia conflicts play out whilst being in their midst covering the stories.

S&F

[edit on 10/1/09 by 04326]

Originally posted by fatdad
why do they keep lying and saying gaza is a refugee camp?.. try google earth it looks like any normal western city ... as for whom to blame look no further than hamas....

[edit on 10-1-2009 by fatdad]

My god you're right!! I'm on Google Earth right now, and Gaza looks just swell. No bodies, no fires no ruins.

Huh! well I guess we can just write of the bad news from the past two weeks to mean spirited anti-Semitic propaganda.

*end sarcasm*

And by god, yes I am sick of these inane comparisons. I find them unbelievably patronizing, and utterly misleading. They have no bearing on the situation whatsoever.

A comparison I find quite accurate in this conflict however is this one:

Genocide is wrong!

I don't care who threw poo on your lawn, stole your wallet, knocked down your door or what have you.

Genocide is wrong!

The fact that Israel fails to grasp this is probably the saddest irony in modern history.

From that initial link (Robert Fisk), this quote is quite reveling:

It took Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times's resident philosopher-in-chief, to speak the unspeakable. "When does the mandate of victimhood expire?" he asked. "At what point does the Nazi genocide of Europe's Jews cease to excuse the state of Israel from the demands of international law and of common humanity?"

those poor people .. looks like hell to live there...







[edit on 10-1-2009 by fatdad]