double standard democracy -and where the media goes wrong and fooled

my friend Allan in LA -USA ,telephoned in the heat of the violent incidents in Gaza , asking about the hamas farfour , and i hope that this article will answer his question , and many qustions in your minds , if you need to know more about children in Gaza (Palestinian children), please visit MECA website mecafor peace .org, it can tell you many beatifull stories about Gazan children, thier determination to enjoy what the occupation and injustice has left for them to enjoy !!!!!!while the rest of the world keeps silent
spread the word say no to the injustice no to racist occupation .
mona


Hamas, Mickey Mouse And
Other Horror Stories:
Those Violent Palestinians Again

By Agustin Velloso

22 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org


The same thing applies to Palestinian violence as to
United States democracy: all the news media talk
frequently about it but none of them has ever seen it
as it really is. The abundance of news aimed at
reporting the intrinsic evil of the Palestinians is
impressive. Last week one could see at peak viewing
time Palestinian pre-school teachers using Mickey
Mouse to teach kids they must wipe out Jews, make
martyrs of themselves, fight to take over the world
and so on.

What a headline! What depth of Middle East conflict
analysis! Those children and their parents before them
have been subjected to constant Israeli bombing for
years - attacks that cause dead and wounded by the
thousand - and yet, to the leading lights of
journalism, what matters, or rather what they are
interested in broadcasting, is that the children of
these victims are taught from infancy to turn into
Islamist terrorists.

Would not the contrary be news, according to a golden
rule of the profession? To their tormentors,
Palestinian children write poems of love - orphaned by
Israeli bombs that have killed their parents, starving
hungry thanks to a criminal blockade by Israel and its
allies, with no hope of leaving that hell since the
United Nations is in no hurry to oblige Israel to
abandon the Occupied Territories (after 40 years of
illegal occupation now) as it was to force Iraq to
abandon Kuwait (after 6 months).

In that same week an Israeli soldier, in a punishment
operation in Nablus, killed an unborn Palestinian
whose mother is still lying wounded in hospital. Maha
Katouri, a 30 year old Palestinian mother lost the
child in her womb, seven months into the pregnancy, to
a bullet that perforated her abdomen and destroyed her
unborn baby's head.

Non-news is that the Israeli soldier who fired the
shot is in Occupied Palestinian territory illegally:
non-news also are his orders to shoot to kill
Palestinians, including women and children in their
houses, not because Israel faces non-existent Arab
aggression, but rather to contribute, death by death,
captive by captive, eviction by eviction, to the
genocide of the Palestinians. For the international
community the latest anniversary of the final solution
of the Jewish Question which ended with the complete
defeat of the Nazi regime is news. Non-news is the
continuing final solution of the Palestinian Question,
begun with the establishment of Israel and which every
Israeli government since 1948 has continued with the
blessing of that same international community.

Just-barely-news is that the same week a dozen
Palestinians have died and many more have been wounded
at Israel's hands. Non-news is that the remainder
suffers the effects of an international economic
blockade applied to a population under military
occupation by a member country of the United Nations.
Also non-news is that every last bullet has been paid
for by the United States which subsidises Israel's
army of occupation with US$3 billion a year.

News is the falsehood that Condi Rice travels to
Jerusalem to promote peace. Non-news is that the
European Union approves Israel's genocidal policy,
since it does nothing to make Israel respect UN
resolutions and international humanitarian law. News
is that the European Union does not talk with the
Hamas government, which has not occupied Israel and
has not broken international law, because purportedly
it includes extremists.

Non-news is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
children receive daily from the Israeli Mickey Mouse
throughout their lives an education far more effective
than one that even the most intelligent Palestinian
teacher could not devise: Occupier education. This
teaches them the Occupier is much stronger than the
occupied and thus to abandon the land the Occupier
covets or take the consequences, which are non-news or
old news: a wall that condemns them to live in a
prison, demolition house by house to make way for
colonies exclusively for Jews, the loss of means to
make a living so that they emigrate and, above all,
prison (Israeli prisons hold 11,000 Palestinian
captives) and death (5000 Palestinian dead since 2000)
for resisting all the foregoing.

Non-news is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian
children grow up traumatized by the extreme violence
to which they are subjected by the fourth most
powerful army in the world, equipped with F-16 fighter
bombers, Merkava tanks and snipers whom Israel daily
sends into the Occupied Territories to fire on the
unarmed civilian population. News, on the other hand,
is that Israeli children in Sderot suffer
psychological stress from Qassam rockets, whose
minimal destructive capacity, however, is non-news: a
total of seven people in Israel have died from 4500
launches since 2001. Non-news too is that between ten
and twenty Palestinians regularly die from a single
Israeli missile.

It is unreasonable for these journalists and editors
to report stress suffered by children in Sderot but
not that of Palestinian children. Nor is it credible
that these reporters and opinion-formers cannot work
out that the ambience of extreme violence in which
Palestinian children live not only explains why they
sing songs that help them endure the terror they live
through, but also that it is the inevitable result of
Israel's criminal policies. It is impossible to
understand that the news is not the friendly Mickey
Mouse as a teaching aid for Palestinian kids, but
rather the terrifying Israeli soldier that shoots them
point blank.

So why then do they publish news as they do?Because
they are supporters of Israel, racist towards
Palestinians and anti-Islamic or all these at once.
Except to those unwilling to see, this is so obvious
that its demonstration has not even needed the mention
in this article of what some might say is fundamental:
that the Mickey Mouse news item is a fake. Its falsity
parallels the fraud used years ago to justify the
first attack on Iraq: that Iraqis were killing
newborns by tearing them from incubators. The daughter
of the Kuwaiti ambassador in the United States enjoyed
a universal audience to watch her weep as she related
this event, which existed entirely in her imagination.
The correction of her false witness was much more
discreet.

The Palestinian Mickey Mouse story is yet one more of
the numerous lies disseminated by Israel and taken as
it stood by Western journalists. The translation of
the Mickey Mouse words, again, as happens with
statements about Israel attributed to Ahmedinejad and
in other cases too, is corrupt. But which news outlet
is going to ask for an explanation from the people who
distributed it? Which TV presenter is going to
publicly admit they were fooled? Which chief editor is
going to confess that they failed to check the -
obviously Israeli - source?