Our Wednesday News Analysis | Behind the mask

Joe Biden and Rishi Sunak and Olaf Scholz and Keir Starmer
Sourced by the Telegraph

As European governments of the Left and the Right move to restrict immigration, the face of which is the Muslim migrant, they have chosen to use the charge of anti-Semitism as a way of disciplining and punishing disobedient minorities.

The flip side of that coin is an Israel-right-or-wrong foreign policy that has brought Gaza to the brink of ethnic cleansing and genocide.

At the time of the truce or ‘humanitarian pause’, the number of people killed by Israel in its pulverisation of Gaza was 14,532 according to the Gaza media office, with an additional 7,000 missing, likely buried in the rubble. Forty per cent of this figure is made up of children, and women and children together account for approximately two-thirds of the death toll.

No conflict in the 21st century has seen children being killed at such a rate. Eighty per cent of Gaza’s population has been made homeless.

Nearly every member of the Israeli cabinet has made statements that rhetorically endorse genocide and/or ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

And yet, the leaders of the Western world, with a couple of honourable exceptions, continue to legitimise and endorse Israel’s slaughter as a natural extension of its right to self-defence or as the inevitable consequence of Hamas’s October 7 massacre.

Read more: Behind the mask

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ISRAEL-PALESTINE WAR: HOW A SLOGAN BECAME BIGGER NEWS THAN THE MURDER OF BABIES IN GAZA

Source: Middle East Eye
https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-palestine-war-gaza-slogan-bigger-news-murder-babies

By Jonathan Cook
Published November 27, 2023

The protest chant 'From the river to the sea' rejects not Israelis or Jews but the apartheid nature of Israel. This is why pro-Israel western politicians and media want to criminalise it

A demonstrator displays a sign saying 'From the river to the sea' during a rally in solidarity with Palestinians in Berlin on 11 November 2023 (AFP)

"But editors at the BBC’s News at Six decided to lead the foreign coverage not with the babies being killed by Israel’s withholding of fuel but with a story from the other side of the divide. It must have been one of the most perverse news judgments on record.

Instead, the BBC led with the brother of a British-Israeli man
who had been killed during Hamas’ attack on 7 October.

The attack itself was by then more than a month old, which even the BBC seemed to understand could not justify
demoting the dying babies from the top foreign news slot."

The lead foreign story for the BBC on 13 November should have been a no-brainer. As Israeli soldiers surrounded al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza, preparing to storm it, dozens of premature babies inside the facility had been removed from their incubators. The hospital no longer had any power to run the machines.

Distressing footage showed the babies huddled together in a makeshift, foil-lined pen, shivering from cold. Several had already died...

Read more: Israel-Palestine war: How a slogan became bigger news than the murder of babies in Gaza

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THE MASTERFUL PROPAGANDA OF ‘DEADLIEST DAY FOR JEWS SINCE THE HOLOCAUST’

Source: Mondoweiss
https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/the-masterful-propaganda-of-deadliest-day-for-jews-since-the-holocaust/

By Tom Suarez
Published November 26, 2023

Israel and its supporters are engaging in Holocaust revisionism to justify its genocidal attack on Gaza.

PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF ISRAEL, GILAD ERDAN, AT THE UN WEARING A YELLOW STAR. (PHOTO: SCREENSHOT FROM VIDEO ON THE TELEGRAPH YOUTUBE CHANNEL)

"Yet the Israeli state now squanders the memory of the Nazis’ victims to empower its race crimes, a tactic of which the “deadliest day since” is a particularly cynical example.

Hidden in those words is, 'We, Israel, are the moral weight of the Holocaust, and those who challenge us are the heirs of the Nazis.'”

October 7, 2023, was a deadly day for people on the Israeli side of the Armistice line with Gaza. Most of the casualties were Israeli (some were foreign workers), and all the Israelis were presumably Jewish. Whether, as the much-quoted phrase at issue has it, October 7 was “the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust” is debatable; but let’s assume that it was, even though the official number of 1,200 does not distinguish between civilians and soldiers, nor between civilians killed by Hamas versus those killed by the IDF in its botched rescue.

The problem with the phrase is not statistics. The problem, rather, is that this lament’s exterior message is merely a Trojan horse for powerful propaganda hidden within.

For 75 years and counting, the Israeli state has been working towards removing as many non-Jews as possible from the river to the sea and subjugating any remaining non-Jews to apartheid. That is the so-called “conflict,” unabridged. But this being unacceptable in the modern world, Israel must constantly invert reality, a chore which the hidden messages of “the deadliest day since the Holocaust” accomplish brilliantly.

By invoking the Holocaust and the victims’ identity as Jews, it subliminally but powerfully reinforces the lie that Palestinians are hostile to Israelis because they are Jewish and that Hamas’s breaching of the siege on October 7 was rooted in antisemitism. And it takes eyes off the actual crime — that Israel has turned Gaza into a concentration camp for non-Jews.

Read more: The masterful propaganda of ‘deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust’