US media erase Israeli state and settler violence

Rania Khalek Media Watch 20 November 2014

Palestinians protest at the recent killing — by Israeli police — of Kheir Hamdan in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana.

Omar Sameer ActiveStills

As Tuesday’s grisly murder of five Israelis in a Jerusalem synagogue by two Palestinian assailants continues to dominate headlines, major media outlets are actively erasing the Israeli violence that preceded the attack and the surging anti-Palestinian assaults that have followed. 

In typical fashion, The New York Times buried information alluding to Palestinian death and suffering in the fourteenth paragraph, while CNN disappeared Palestinians from the discussion entirely. 

The Washington Post went even further, using the synagogue attack as an opportunity to erase Israeli violence against Palestinians both past and present. 

Noting that the attack site is located in what used to be Deir Yassin — a Palestinian village destroyed in 1948 after Zionist militias deliberately executed more than one hundred of its inhabitants, including children — the Post rendered the massacre an unproven accusation against Israel.

Following an uproar on social media, the Post quietly removed the reference to Deir Yassin from the piece without issuing an explanation or correction.

These same media outlets are gleefully painting Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip as heartless monsters based on a marginal celebration that took place in Gaza City.  

“Residents of the Gaza Strip paraded in the streets singing victory songs, giving out candy, waving flags,” declared The New York Times, eliciting images of widespread jubilation.  

An earlier New York Times piece claimed that in Gaza City, “praise for God and the attackers poured from mosque loudspeakers.” That paragraph appears to have been quietly scrubbed without explanation, but not before Zionist ideologues had a chance to exploit it.

Speaking from Gaza where he is currently stationed, journalist and Mondoweiss contributor Dan Cohen told The Electronic Intifada that there was indeed a celebratory rally organized by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in Gaza City but the celebrations were far from widespread.

“A small minority celebrated. That’s what being besieged and bombed does to people,” said Cohen, adding that it was hardly representative of the sentiment in Gaza, where residents are desperately preoccupied with escaping what he calls the “catastrophic” deterioration of conditions in the rubble-cluttered enclave.  

Cohen also rejected The New York Times’ claim that celebratory praise for the synagogue attack rang out from mosque loudspeakers. There were a couple of cars driving around with megaphones that could be heard expressing joy for the attack, said Cohen, but that’s all. Gaza resident Mohammed Suliman and journalist Jehad Saftawi, who were with Cohen when we spoke, concurred.

While fringe celebrations among Palestinians have been widely reported, the more commonplace right-wing Israeli demonstrations agitating for greater violence and “death to Arabs” have been conspicuously absent from establishment media coverage, even though mainstream reporters are clearly aware of these rallies. 

This follows a longstanding pattern that was most apparent during Israel’s recent assault on Gaza, which killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians, most of them civilians, including more than five hundred children.

As Israel mercilessly targeted civilians in the densely populated coastal enclave, western media outlets published scandalous justifications for the mounting atrocities, frequently blaming Palestinians for their own slaughter. 

Under this convoluted paradigm, racist Israeli mobs joyfully singing “In Gaza there’s no studying, No children are left there” were virtually ignored in the mainstream press, as was the rampant genocidal incitement in Israeli social media and from high-level Israeli lawmakers. 

Amid a rising tide of Israeli fascism, the mainstream media narrative of an Israel under constant and unrelenting attack from wildly violent and murder-celebrating Palestinians is more than just dishonest. It is dangerous propaganda that shields Israel’s unchecked extremism from scrutiny, guaranteeing and inciting further atrocities against the defenseless and disenfranchised Palestinian population, some of whom will respond with violence. 

Profiles of the Jewish victims killed in the synagogue attack have appeared in one media outlet after another, interspersed with quotes from heartbroken loved ones. The same cannot be said of the countless Palestinians attacked, maimed and killed by Israeli violence, whose names and photos rarely make it into mainstream news accounts. 

Here are some of their harrowing stories from the last two weeks alone, stories that will be replicated thanks in no small part to a mainstream media that sees them as unworthy victims.

Israeli bullet to the face blinds 11-year-old boy

On 13 November, Israeli police shot eleven-year-old Saleh Samer Attiyeh Mahmoud between the eyes at close range with a sponge-tipped bullet in Issawiyeh — a village in occupied East Jerusalem — permanently blinding him in his left eye and severely damaging the vision in his right.

Residents in Issawiyeh had been demonstrating against Israel’s closure of three of the village’s four entrances when they were met with brute police force, now an everyday occurrence accross East Jerusalem neighborhoods inhabited by Palestinians who dare to push back. 

Lining the Israeli police arsenal in this area are “sponge rounds” that “are made of high-density plastic with a foam-rubber head, and are fired from grenade launchers,” according to the Ma’an News Agency. “Israeli police have been using them in Israel and occupied East Jerusalem since the use of rubber-coated metal bullets was prohibited, but protocol explicitly prohibits firing them at the upper body,” adds Ma’an.

Yet the upper body is exactly where Israeli police are aiming this weapon, especially at child targets. 

On 31 August, Israeli police shot sixteen-year-old Muhammad Sinokrot in the head at close range with a sponge-tipped bullet as he chatted on his cell phone while making his way to mosque for night-time prayers in East Jerusalem’s Wadi al-Joz neighborhood. He died days later.

Even then Israeli police insisted that they shot him in the leg, causing him to fall and hit his head. This was exposed as a lie after an autopsy determined that the teen was shot in the head, as his family had stated.  

Cracking the skull of a 10-year-old girl

On Friday, 14 November, Mayar Amran Twafic al-Natsheh, ten years old, was riding in her grandfather’s car near the Shuafat refugee camp checkpoint when Israeli forces opened fire on their vehicle, striking Mayar in the face with a rubber-coated steel bullet that penetrated and shattered the car window.  

Adding insult to injury, Israeli police detained Mayar’s father as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from a fractured skull.

Ten-year-old Gaza boy shot in the neck for “loitering”

On 16 November, Israeli forces from the Nahal Brigade opened fire on a ten-year-old Palestinian boy for walking too close to the southern fence of the Kissufim checkpoint between present-day Israel and Gaza. 

The Israeli army defended the soldiers’ actions, arguing that because loitering is prohibited in the area, the soldiers “followed protocol by shooting into the air, shooting the lower body, then … it was decided to follow the procedure by shooting the center of the body.”

Critically wounded by a bullet to the neck, the child was flown out by helicopter for treatment at Soroka University Medical Center in Bir al-Saba (Beersheva), a city in the Naqab (Negev) region of present-day Israel. 

To justify shooting a small unarmed child, the Israeli army asserted with zero evidence that “the boy was sent as a scout by one of Gaza’s terror factions to test the troops’ level of alert and response times.”   

Settlers attack with knives and bullets

On Tuesday, 18 November, in the aftermath of the synagogue attack, a Palestinian teenager identified by Ma’an News Agency as sixteen-year-old Ibrahim Mahmoud was shot by an Israeli settler following a settler riot near Beitin village in the West Bank. 

Ibrahim was one of several Palestinians attacked that day. 

While walking in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Kafr Aqab, 22-year-old Fadi Jalal Radwan was stabbed in the legs and back by a gang of Israelis after they asked him for a light.

Over the summer, as Israeli lynch mobs roamed the streets in search of Palestinians to attack, they would ask their potential victims for a cigarette or the time to determine, based on the accent in their response, if they were Arab.

Mysterious and forgotten lynching-style deaths

Almost immediately after 32-year-old Yousuf Hasan al-Ramouni, a Palestinian bus driver, was found hanged to death in his bus at a terminal in West Jerusalem, where anti-Arab sentiment is alarmingly palpable, Israeli police labeled it a suicide, insisting there were “no signs of violence on the body.” This was contradicted by photos of al-Ramouni’s lifeless body that surfaced on social media, revealing bruises along his torso. 

Al-Ramouni’s colleague, Muatasem Fakeh, disputed the suicide claim. 

“We saw signs of violence on his body,” he told AFP. “He was hanged over the steps at the back of the bus in a place where it would be impossible to hang yourself alone.” 

Al-Ramouni’s family adamantly rejects the Israeli line as well, maintaining that he was a happy father and husband who would not take his own life. 

The police have since cited an Israeli autopsy report that ruled al-Ramouni’s death a suicide as proof that their initial assessment was accurate. But Saber al-Aloul, a Palestinian pathologist who participated in the autopsy, suspects al-Ramouni was murdered and believes further forensic tests will prove this to be the case. 

While anything is possible, the Israeli authorities have a history of promoting false narratives to cover up hate crimes committed by Jewish Israelis against Palestinians.

After sixteen-year-old Muhammad Abu Khudair was forced to drink gasoline and burned alive by three Jewish extremists, Israeli police planted the nasty rumor that Abu Khudair was murdered by his family in an anti-gay honor killing. 

According to data compiled by Yesh Din, an Israeli legal advocacy group, from 2005 to 2014 Israeli police failed to properly investigate 83 percent of settler hate crimes against Palestinians in the West Bank.

Israeli police have demonstrated a similar lack of interest in getting to the bottom of attacks on Palestinians inside Israel.

Shot dead and deliberately set on fire 

On 11 November, Nihad Mufid Ahmad Nalowa, a 35-year-old Palestinian worker from the West Bank, was shot dead by an identified gunman in Zemer, a Palestinian town located inside Israel. 

Days earlier, on 8 November, Mahmoud Kamel Qalalweh, a 23-year-old Palestinian worker, was critically injured when unidentified assailants deliberately set his body on fire in Tamra, a Palestinian village in northeastern Israel. 

Neither case elicited much attention. Nor is it clear whether Israeli police are investigating the incidents.  

Inciting vigilante violence against Palestinians

Israel’s Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch was accused of inciting vigilante violence after applauding the swift police execution of the Palestinian driver responsible for a vehicular attack in Jerusalem on 5 November. 

“The action of the border police officer who chased the terrorist and quickly killed him is the right and professional action, and that is the way I would like these incidents to end,” said Aharonovitch. “A terrorist who strikes civilians should be killed.”

Many understood this as a call for police and armed civilians to act as judge, jury and executioner against perceived “terrorists” — which seems to be interchangeable with “Arabs” in the Israeli lexicon.

The Association for Civil Rights in Israel and the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights linked Aharonovitch’s incitement to the police murder of 22-year-old Kheir Hamdan days later.

On 9 November, in the Galilee village of Kufr Kana, Israeli police shot Hamdan after he banged on their vehicle with an unidentifiable object. 

CCTV footage of the killing reveals that, contrary to the police version of events, the officers shot Hamdan at close range without warning as he ran away and then shot him again after he was injured and bleeding on the ground. 

Nevertheless, in the immediate aftermath of the synagogue attack, Aharonovitch announced that he would seek the easing of gun restrictions for Israelis. In a society increasingly gripped with genocidal hatred of its indigenous inhabitants, such a move could prove disastrous. 

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Comments

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WeAreOne replied on

Thank you Rania and ElecIntifada for exposing the crimes of Israel, please continue to do so.
We need Justice for the Palestinians, We demand their Liberty, We demand their Freedom.
Long Live Palestine.

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Debbie Davis replied on

I am sure it will be totally ignored, but I sent a Facebook message to Brian Williams last night, calling him a bigot and asking him how he slept at night after ignoring the Palestinian bus driver hanged, the Palestinian boy set on fire and the arrest of a 2 year old.

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Peter Loeb replied on

On 7/24/14 I wrote a brief essay (internal) in which I pointed out "The
Hypocrisy of Non-Violence". This is it seems a fabrication particularly of "liberals " in the West used to comfort when appropriate.

In fact, non-violence is never a relevant response. It never has been.
In the Christian Crusades when a warrior was violently unhorsed,
his head was just as violently separated from his body. Inasmuch
as this constituted a "just war" (St. Augustine of Hippo based on
Biblical colonialism) it was admired and the separated heads were
thrown into a beseiged town to frighten its defenders ( Antioch,
Jeruselum etc.) . This "barbarism" is conveniently "forgotten" by advocates
of those who claim they are superior. Historically, both sides were violent.

The issue is not the violence itself. Both sides are violent and have always
been through the centuries. The issue is instead: is this kind of violence
("barbarism" if you prefer that term) acceptable? Whose violence do
you choose?

The Vietnamese did not achieve their freedom without violence. Neither
did South Africans. North American Indians were beaten, massacred. They
fought back but finally recognized that they would never be
free from their oppressor. Which indigenous group has been non-violent
going back thousands of years?

The article above by Rania Khalek is welcome as other commenters have made clear.

----Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA

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Anonymous replied on

Hey are people aware that Twitter is strangling off real discourse, dissenters without huge follower numbers, messing with feeds and DMs? Ello is nowhere's-ville as it blocks entry and viewing by anonymous viewers. So? It's back to the blogs but there needs to be a non-commercial Twitter-like communication method to help glue blogs together that can't be strangled or blocked and that upholds user security and anonymity.

Meanwhile in Ferguson... Take a look at this by the investigative journalist and author of “Glenn Greenwald And The Irrelevance Of Electoral Politics” ( https://twitter.com/MintPressN... ): http://www.endarken.co.nz/diar... Here’s some background on the “Urewera 4″ and the Crown’s attack on Maori indigenous https://www.youtube.com/watch?... See any parallels? "Dirty Wars" much?

Rania Khalek

Rania Khalek's picture

Rania Khalek is an independent journalist reporting on the underclass and marginalized.