Daily Crimes Are Actually The Crime of False Information

The Pals. are at it again, here (spelling errors preserved):-

Settlers attacks on the Palestinian people and their land and property have lately become daily violations of Palestinian rights...Only on March 8 and 9 three of such attacks occurred.

A group of settlers from Nahale’l settlement, which located close to Beit Illo village west of Ramallah, cut more than 80 olive trees on March 9. The trees belonged to Mohammad Jebrel, in Al Thahrat area close to the village.  Mohammad Jebrel said that this attack came as part of series of attacks on his land. In fact, the settlers had already cut his olive trees before. However, he replanted them again.

In another case of settlers attacking Palestinian land and trees, a group of settlers from Elieh settlement, in Nablus district, cut 40 olive trees in Qariout village on Friday March 9. The villagers discovered the when they went after time again to their land. The Israeli occupation forces allow the farmers of Qariout to access their land only twice a year for a short periods: once in the olive harvesting and once in the plowing season [BS and besides, that particular plot is not theirs]. The villagers said that the settlers cut 40 olive trees [there were no trees there] and destroyed the land [???] in the area located close to Elieh [Eli] settlement. Elieh encroaches on the village from the west.

Further, the security guards of the Shilo and Elieh settlements entered the village from several entrance and threatened the villagers not to go to their lands. They shot bullets which caused power outages as they damaged the electricity infrastructure [er, that's BS and besides, Arabs twice infiltrated Shiloh, once stealing a guard dog they drugged and ran into Qaryut and hid in the mosque which gave them sanctuary from the IDF who entered].

Many of the villagers are affected by this further attack on the livelihoods of the farming community. Among the owners of the trees are Mahmoud Bader Abu Nejem, Mahmoud Rateb, Ahed Khalil, Hisham Jaber, Abdulnaser Badawi, Hamad Badawi, Abdulghani Badawi and Mahmoud Falah. All of them condemn the settlers attack on their land.

So boring, so predestined propaganda.

^

Countering Pal. Propaganda

Have you seen the "Never Before Campaign" clip? I blogged about it here.

If not, you don't have to see it unless you are in the Hasbarah activity business.

And if you have seen it, check this out:

They were promoting a video which promised to “summarize the Palestinian cause in two minutes.” It sounded interesting, so I clicked on the link and watched.

What I saw was a Palestinian propaganda film, pure and simple.

You might be thinking: C’mon, from your pro-Israel perspective, the film was propaganda, but from the perspective of a Palestinian supporter it was a fair presentation of the issues.

In order to determine which view is legitimately true, we first need to define: What is propaganda?

Propaganda is based on the premise that people are emotional. Propaganda typically presents little or no facts, using techniques like selective omission and over-simplification to play on sentiments and feelings. Propaganda uses highly-charged images and slogans to produce an emotional, rather than a rational, response...

...On one level, the images are extremely powerful and convincing. But on a deeper level, this video is propaganda -- a complete distortion of the issues. Viewers may be emotionally moved, but there is no rational basis to back it up.

That’s why Aish.com teamed up with filmmaker Micah Smith to produce our own version of this film that exposes the propaganda for what it is.

By adding some concrete facts and information, the message of the movie is easily flipped around to become a pro-Israel film, revealing the superficiality of the original. Due to the constraints of the medium, our version of the film cannot possible address all the issues. Therefore we recommend reading the articles below that explore some of these topics in depth.

Ultimately, it’s a lesson in the power of the media, and how -- if we don’t want to be manipulated -- we need to constantly be on guard.

Take a look at their version, second clip there.

Propaganda - The Pinnacle of a Nadir

In Propaganda (1928), Edward Bernays explained the manipulation of public opinion. For him, the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.

To 'borrow' his words:

Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of...In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethicalthinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not the intellect.

Others studying propaganda note that the human brain is designed to process images, not words. "A picture is worth a thousand words" sounds trite, but it is accurate. Words are an artificial communication medium: symbols with meanings attached to them. The brain must decipher the words of an editorial or a speech, and convert them into images.

Like this bit of Pal. propaganda:

Example of Pal. Propaganda

Found here:

West Bank, Palestine: Israelis kidnap children

Tuba, South Hebron Hills, West Bank, (International Solidarity Movement):
25 June 2009

[Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal. Most settlement outposts are considered illegal under Israeli law.]

On the morning of June 25, Israeli police detained two Palestinian children, Ahmed Omar Jundyye, age 15, and Redwan Ibrahim Jundyye, age 16, near the village of Tuba. The young boys, accompanied by internationals, were grazing their flocks near their village of Tuba, located in the South Hebron Hills.

Israeli settlers from the illegal outpost, Havat Ma’on, observed the young boys for sometime before the Israeli military arrived. The Israeli military jeep drove to a home within Havat Ma’on and the soldiers spoke with the settlers. After speaking with the settlers, the soldiers approached the young boys and the internationals demanding that they provide personal identification, saying that the boys were in a forbidden area.

The Israeli police arrived at the scene and, after conferencing with the settlers and soldiers, detained the two young boys at 10:00AM and took them to the Kiryat Arba police station. The police refused to provide a reason for the detention of the young boys.

The young Palestinian boys were held in detention at Kiryat Arba Police Station for nearly five hours before being released.

Responding to the detention, one of the boys’ fathers said, “they weren’t doing anything, they graze their sheep there everyday.”

Kidnapping?

Is that what police do, in broad-daylight, for five hours?

Rational Criticism of Israel

At yesterday's "Salute to Israel" Parade


(Kippah tip: AtlasShrugs)

So, Not So "Occupied"?

Ashley Perry, an editor at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs for the Middle East Strategic Information Project, deals with the war of words and specifically the term "occupation":

...ISRAEL DOES not fit the literal definition of an occupying force. The Hague Conventions and the later Geneva Conventions of 1949 do not appear to apply definitively to the West Bank. The West Bank has never been sovereign territory, and was won from a nation which held no legal claim to the area. After Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza, former Supreme Court president Meir Shamgar wrote in the 1970s that there is no de jure applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention regarding occupied territories to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, since the convention "is based on the assumption that there had been a sovereign which was ousted, and that it had been a legitimate sovereign."

To take it a step further, former US State Department legal adviser Stephen Schwebel, who later headed the International Court of Justice in The Hague, wrote in 1970 regarding Israel's case: "Where the prior holder of territory had seized that territory unlawfully, the state which subsequently takes that territory in the lawful exercise of self-defense has, against that prior holder, better title."

...[the] UN Security Council Resolution 242 which, according to its drafters, allows Israel to hold onto territories it won in the 1967 war. This stands in contradistinction to other theaters of conflict and occupation.

...THE TERM occupation has been long used as an accusation by the Palestinians...Perhaps even more worryingly, the Israeli government has bought into this terminology, which flies in the face of its own legal opinions.

The Road Map which was agreed to by the government referred to an "occupation that began in 1967," and soon after prime minister Ariel Sharon criticized what he called the "occupation" in the territories. By referring to the West Bank as occupied, Sharon broke one of the greatest taboos in Israeli governmental policy.

Today, it has almost become commonplace for high-ranking officials like Tzipi Livni to use the term "occupation" in their speeches. Consequently, the government has adopted the language of its accusers in the media, and has thus handed itself a major defeat in its own PR war.

And There Are Some Empty People, Too

From Diana Muir’s -

"A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land"

According to the late Edward Said the phrase the ‘A land without people for a people without a land,’ was coined by a Zionist named Israel Zangwill for the purpose of making the false claim that Palestine was empty...The phrase “A land without a people for a people without a land,” was not coined by a Jew, was never widely propagated by Zionists, and was not intended by the Victorian-era Christians who did use it to imply that Palestine was empty. It meant, quite specifically, that in the nineteenth century there was no self-identified Palestinian people in the land that would become Israel.

Edward Said even cited the phrase incorrectly, omitting the definite article to turn, “A land without a people,” into “A land without people,” and more effectively charge Zionists with falsely claiming that the land was empty.

But if Israel Zangwill didn’t coin this familiar phrase, who did?

A Scots Presbyterian in a frock coat, the Rev. Dr. Alexander Keith, who was sent to the Holy Land by the Church of Scotland on an 1839 fact-finding mission. His task: to determine whether the land was ready for the Jews to return (he thought that it was.) Keith published a book describing his trip and urging Christians to help the Jews, “a people without a country,” return to Israel, “a country without a people.”

...Keith and the other Christians who used the phrase perceived the Holy Land as being the homeland of the Jews in the way that Greece was the homeland of the Greeks, and Scotland was the land of the Scots. They did not perceive the Arabs who lived in Palestinian as having a separate Palestinian ethnic or national identity, rather, they saw them as part of a larger Arab people. In this they were correct. The idea of a Palestinian people would not be proposed by Arab intellectuals until the twentieth century.

Rev. Keith urged Britain to “give Judea to the Jews” just as “Greece was given to the Greeks” in 1829...

Exactly what I have been saying and writing.

Film Noire

Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American living in El-Bireh/Ramallah (and may be reached at sbahour@palnet.com).

So what, you ask?

Well, so I found this linked at the Int'l Herald Tribune (here)

... My father and I drove through the last Israeli checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem while heading to the Palestinian National Theatre at the invitation of The Palestinian Agricultural Relief Committees (PARC) to attend the premiere of a new documentary on Jerusalem...

...Tonight, the theatre was packed tight. Young and old local Palestinian Jerusalemites, staff from the dozens of international agencies based in Jerusalem, donor representatives, foreign representatives, media, and the crew that produced the film were all present. The audience anxiously awaited the lights to be turned out and the film to start..."The Iron Wall" and tonight's film, "Jerusalem...The east side story," reveal the strategic policies that aim to Judaize [notice that?]the city and control Palestinian demographic growth. The resulting collective punishment is part of a larger scheme to pressure Palestinians into submission or flight.

"Jerusalem...The east side story" is a documentary that squeezes nearly 100 years of history into an hour or so of cinema...The producer of the film, Ms. Terry Boullata, stated at the outset of the evening that the intention of the documentary is to bring the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence to the Western audience who has shown by way of its acquiescence to the ongoing Israeli military occupation that it still needs to be educated.

...today's globalised generation of Palestinians will not drop the torch of this just cause. Knowing that Palestinian mothers across the occupied territory and throughout refugee camps in Palestine and abroad are explaining our just cause to yet another generation (regretfully I'm sure) somehow makes up for the lack of coherence and leadership today.

There's a lot more but this is just another indication of the persistence of Pal. propaganda and the willingness of manstream media vehicles to pass this along. They did have this blurb:

The views and opinions of other Web sites are not necessarily shared by the IHT.

but still, the exploitation exists.