Israel Continues Its Criminal Campaign of Terror Against Palestinians

July 14, 2014 in Montana

by lizard

As a new week begins, America’s closest ally in the Middle East continues its disproportionate assault on 1.5 million Palestinians, an assault a handful of US citizens can’t seem to escape:

Mohammed is one of several hundred Palestinians with dual American citizenship who remained in Gaza Sunday night, unable to leave as fighting there entered its seventh day. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that more than 174 people have been killed in the last week, as many as one-third of them children. While regional and western officials, including those from the U.S., have pressed both sides to agree to a cease-fire, Israel’s top leadership and Hamas officials abroad have said that the recent round of fighting could continue for days, or weeks to come. “I’m so worried, mostly for my children,” said Mohammed, who has been working as a freelance photographer in Gaza for years, and who recently became a TED fellow. “This isn’t easy for anyone, to be stuck here.” Mohammed said she has been trying to leave Gaza for weeks. She entered Gaza through its Rafah border crossing with Egypt last month to visit family, bringing her two young daughters, 3 years old and 18 months old, with her. Once inside, she discovered that to leave required a complex system of bribing Egyptian officials to be put on a “VIP list,” which, if she was lucky, would get them out. “I wrote the U.S. Embassy and they told me they couldn’t help. They said they couldn’t interfere to get me out,” Mohammed said. It was only after organizers from TED contacted the embassy directly that a consular officer got in touch with her, she said.

It’s not surprising the US government is worthless when it comes to actually protecting its citizens from Israel’s tyrannical slaughtering of (mostly) civilians. Just look at the disgusting deference to Israel exhibited by a Democrat Congresswoman over the vicious assault experienced by one of her own Florida constituents:

Tarek Abu Khdeir, a 15-year-old Palestinian-American high school student from Tampa, was brutally beaten in a videotaped July 3 incident in occupied East Jerusalem by Israeli border police. After being thrown in prison, he is now held under house arrest without charges, unable to receive adequate medical care for the extensive injuries he sustained during the beating. (Video of the alleged beating at the bottom of this article) Abu Khdeir’s family has beseeched their congressional representative, Castor, to publicly call for his release and immediate return to the United States. Though her staff has met repeatedly with the family, she has said and done nothing of substance to assist them. “If Tarek [Abu Khdeir] was a Jewish American teen, everybody and their mother would be howling for his release,” Hassan Shibly, chief director of CAIR-Florida and the Abu Khdeir family’s legal representative told me. “What we’re seeing here is a clear double standard.” While sources close to Abu Khdeir’s family say Castor’s staff has treated the family with respect even as they rebuffed their demands, a distant relative who visited Castor’s field office in Tampa to plead for help said she was “yelled out, intimidated, and insulted” by a staffer.

While US officials are servile to the apartheid state of Israel as it commits war crimes, like targeting water/sewer systems and using banned DIME weapons, some US musicians show what it’s like to still have a conscious. In a short article about a Neil Young concert being canceled (because of Palestinian rockets) there is a nice quote from Eddie Vedder:

Meanwhile, Pearl Jam lead singer Eddie Vedder on Friday denounced Israel in an expletive-laden tirade during a concert in England. “I swear to f***ing god, there are people out there who are looking for a reason to kill,” Vedder said. “They’re looking for a reason to go across borders and take over land that doesn’t belong to them. “They should get the f*** out, and mind their own f***ing business. We don’t want to give them our money. We don’t want to give them our taxes to drop bombs on children.”

Brian Eno has also gone on record with pointed criticism regarding how Israeli atrocities are being depicted by western media:

In an 11 July letter in the Guardian, Eno, formerly of the band Roxy Music, writes that he had been an “active and vocal supporter of the BBC for the whole of my adult life.” The reason he said was because of its “famous impartiality.” “But now that reputation [for impartiality] is being eroded,” the musician writes. “It’s a drift I started to notice a few years ago, and which I think has become very obvious.” Eno explains:

The most recent incident concerns the killing of three Israeli teenagers in Hebron. This admittedly disgusting crime has received an entirely disproportionate treatment: listening to the BBC one would be left with the impression that killing children had never happened in [the West Bank] before. But it has. And it happens with monotonous regularity. Not, by and large, to Israeli children, but to Palestinians. And not only killing, but imprisonment and torture and day-to-day harassment and brutality. This goes on all the time – and I see little reaction to it from the international media. Unfortunately, that increasingly includes the BBC, which now, like many others, seems to regard Palestinian lives as less valuable, less newsworthy.

Here is another article about the obvious media distortion:

Since the beginning of the offensive, at least 174 Palestinians have been killed and over 1,090 injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Thousands of homes have been destroyed. A handful of Israelis have been injured but none have died from a Hamas launched rocket. Yet despite the disproportionality of the brutality, the establishment media continues to distort the truth by painting Hamas as the sole aggressor. From FOX‘s ‘Gaza Rockets Aimed at Israel: What Would you Do with Just 15 Seconds?’ to liberal alt-news site VOX‘s ‘The Tragedy Never Ends, Palestinian Rockets Force Israeli Peace Conference to Evacuate’ to even Human Rights Watch, a human rights organization that is supposed to be unbiased in its criticism of atrocities, which leads with ‘Indiscriminate Palestinian Rocket Attacks’.

Over the weekend, Israel launched its first ground incursion. More are sure to follow. The media plays a critical role in shaping public opinion. For those in the states, the propaganda keeps Americans in the dark regarding the atrocities their taxes support. Readers of this blog won’t have the luxury of conditioned ignorance. As Israel continues imposing its murderous brutality on a captive population, I will continue compiling links and expounding on the consequences of US complicity in Israeli war crimes. Sadly, there will be more to come.