Gaza and the Language of Genocide

Gaza and the Language of Genocide

by Michael Buergermeister

Copyright Michael Buergermeister

Smashwords Edition

A Nazi is a Nazi be he a Jew or otherwise, and it is false sentiment of the Jewish people to condemn Nazism and condone Jewish fascism.

Protest by the Jewish socialist group Hashomer Hatzair, March 13, 1946, at a secret meeting of the Hagana

Defining Jews by blood descent is consistent with the Nazi definition of a Jew, rather than the traditional concept of a Jew as someone who follows Judaism.

Thomas Suarez

If I knew that it would be possible to save all the (Jewish) children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them to Eretz Israel, then I would opt for the second alternative.

Ben-Gurion, 1938

Naturally, the common people do not want war [...] But in the end it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always easy to bring the people to join in, whether it is a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. [...] That's easy. One just has to tell the people they're being attacked, and accuse the pacifists of lack of patriotism and claim that they're exposing the country to danger. This method works in any country. Hermann Goering 1946

When 2.5 million people live in a closed off Gaza, it's going to be a human catastrophe. Those people will be even bigger animals than they are today, with the aid of an insane fundamentalist Islam. The pressure at the border will be awful. It's going to be a terrible war. So, if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.

Arnon Soffer May 2004

The respect that we owe other people is therefore not one single commandment, not a commandment among commandments. Instead, recognition of one's neighbor represents the entire content of morality, the whole richness of that which God demands from us for the sake of our God-given human dignity. It is the very essence of obligation. Hillel, and Akiba later, already emphasized this significance. They found in the sum of the Torah, the all-encompassing principle.

Das Wesen des Judentums, Nathansen & Lamm, Berlin 1905

Preface

I was profoundly disturbed when, as a teenager in the early 1980s, I watched documentaries about the Holocaust. How was the Holocaust possible? Who was responsible? Was not the entire German populace implicated? Was human nature inherently evil?

At the time Thatcher was methodically destroying Britain and killing Argentinians, Reagan was murdering thousands in El Salvador and the Israelis were directly involved in the massacres of Sabra and Shatila. I became disillusioned with the entire human race and suffered from a deep and enduring depression. Everything seemed surreal.

Most surreal of all was what I learned from several books I found in my local library. I don't recall who wrote them but to a certain extent that doesn't really matter. They left an indelible impression.

One concerned a Hungarian, of English descent, who fled Hungary in 1956 (he literally fought his way out of the country) and who subsequently devoted his life to the fight against Communism. He arrived in Vietnam to discover (much to his horror) that the war had little to do with combatting the Red Menace.

The war was a farce. The Viet Cong made a fortune on the black market; built bunkers with American concrete while US oil companies paid them protection money. Gradually it became clear that the conflict was merely about profit. One VC officer even told the author: We couldn't have won the war without you.

Earlier I'd read more conventional books about Vietnam. I remember one in particular, a beautifully illustrated volume, with a forward by the commanding general in Vietnam: William C. Westmoreland. He complained that the military was forced to fight with its hands tied behind its back. If there was failure it was due to the lack of purpose on the part of the civilians. He even quoted Sun Tzu. I was appalled and (how young and foolish I was!) shared Westmoreland's sense of indignation.

One thing about the tome puzzled me. The VC losses, which were usually rounded up, were invariably enormous but very few weapons were ever found. How could one explain this discrepancy? Regardless of how many VC were killed, it seemed to make no difference whatsoever to the course of the war. This too seemed odd. I couldn't bring myself to believe that the dead were civilians; it was simply out of the question. After all: I'd been brought up on Hollywood movies and the heroes had always been Americans.

Another book I happened upon in that self-same library was a volume about the Palestinians. I was horrified when I read about the massacre of Deir Yassin, where Zionists slaughtered over two hundred defenseless men, women and children. I became acutely aware of the injustice done to the Palestinians.

At university I remember having an argument with a fellow student, a Jewish girl from Manchester. The dominant narrative of the time: that the Palestinians had left of their own accord, I argued, must be wrong; it simply didn't make sense. Deir Yassin couldn't have been an isolated incident. Yet I had no evidence to support my argument. Needless to say: we never became friends.

Everything remained a mystery: the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam and the question of why Israelis were involved in mass murder.

One might regard this book as an attempt to answer the questions of my younger self. Whatever the outcome I dedicate it to the librarian who encouraged me to read such books.

Introduction

In the same way that Brueghel depicts the Fall of Icarus as being a mere detail in the background so the death of 27-year-old Omar Samour, a Palestinian farmer killed when he went to collect parsley east of Khan Younis on March 30 2018, was treated as a mere detail by much of the media. The Jerusalem Post reported: A farmer was killed and a second person was wounded by an Israeli tank shell on Friday, a Gaza health ministry spokesman said, as tensions rose on Friday ahead of planned protests by Palestinians along the border with Israel. (1)

Yasser Samour, a cousin, told AFP: Around 4-5 a.m. they were hit by a rocket. It struck directly. He was not related to any organization, not even Fatah or Hamas. He was just an employee. He was 27 and he had two daughters. (2)

How we think about and perceive the world invariably impacts on our actions. The aim of this book, and this must be stressed again and again, is not to criticize, which is all too easy, but to try to understand a highly complex state of affairs.

Focusing on the language used by the media is important because it doesn't merely mirror events. It alters the reality reported in much the same way that an observer changes an event by virtue of observing it in the field of Quantum Mechanics or anthropology.

That the media is a captive and often merely a slave of the Establishment and frequently simply echoes the views of governments and commercial interests shouldn't surprise anyone. This is a fact of life in any country. That the media struggles to appear free and independent, and by doing so: deceives its viewers and readers, is part of a deeper problem. Objective reporting always was an impossibility. The sooner people are aware of this state of affairs the better. It is ultimately the responsibility of each and everyone to do research on their own. Blaming publications or individual journalists for bias is no longer an option while screaming: fake news is the ultimate folly.

One publication that figures prominently in this book is the The Jerusalem Post. It was chosen because of the high quality of its reporting and because it, although frequently representing a plurality of views, is the quintessential Establishment newspaper. One has to add that reporting in Israel, whether in The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz or The Times of Israel, tends to be of an extremely high standard.

By studying the The Jerusalem Post one attains a considerable degree of understanding as to why things happened in the way that they did and more importantly: what the Establishment wanted the public to think at certain points in time. It thus helps explain why a large portion of the Israeli citizenry acted in the way that they did. Of additional interest is the fact that the newspaper occasionally draws on the ruminations of think tanks, whose reflections are sometimes quite fascinating.

In philosophy, Wittgenstein stated, one must not only learn in each case what is to be said about an object, but how to speak about it. One always has to learn the method of how to tackle it. (3)

In the 1880s Francis Galton devised a technique of registering human faces by means of multiple exposures on the same photographic plate. This was a technique taken up by Wittgenstein in his Lecture on Ethics in 1930 and the one that will be adopted for the purpose of this book. (4)

The aim of this volume is to throw a light on the plight of the Gazans in the months of March, April and May 2018 and how this situation was reflected, falsified and distorted in the language used by the media at the time. This is however by no means an exhaustive media study. The use of sources will be extremely selective indeed.

The objective of this tome is to recognize the features that are common to reports about Gaza in the months of March, April and May 2018 so as to get a rough idea of what actually happened. It also aims to clarify by eliminating what Wittgenstein refers to as nonsense (Unsinn) and empty wheels (leerlaufender raeder).

Another method employed will be that of Paolo Sarpi: There are four modes of philosophizing: the first with reason alone, the second with sense alone, the third with reason and then sense, and the fourth beginning with sense and ending with reason. The first is the worst, because from it we know what we would like to be, not what is. The third is bad because we many times distort what is into what we would like, rather than adjusting what we would like to what is. The second is true but crude, permitting us to know little and that rather of things than of their causes. The fourth is the best we can have in this miserable life. (5)

Theory is vitally important. To quote Einstein when speaking to Heisenberg: But from the basic point of view, it is quite wrong to want to base a theory only on observable quantities; because it is in fact exactly the opposite. Only the theory decides what one can observe. (6)

Four theories will be adumbrated by this book: that the West doesn't abide by its own moral and legal standards, that economic interests, especially arms, gas and oil, play a key role in events, that Israel was created by the West for strategic reasons and fourthly: that Zionism has been a means to this end.

Not only has Zionism been a useful tool of imperialism, Islamic Fundamentalism has been one too. Few ideologies have served Western interests better than Islamic Fundamentalism. Thus one should not be surprised to discover that Jamal Eddine al-Afghani, the ideological great-great-grandfather of Osama bin Laden worked for British Intelligence. (7)

The dichotomy between Western democracy and Islamic Fundamentalism is a false one for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that the West is anything other than democratic. The EU is the most obvious example of this but the voting irregularities in recent UK and US elections are also proof perfect. In addition to this, as John Stockwell pointed out in 1988: America has long been a one party state with an A Team and a B Team. (8)

The aim of this book is not to provide definitive knowledge. Schopenhauer wrote: Everything objective is imagination, hence appearance, a phenomenon of the brain. (9)

The sources used, quoted and referred to will not always be ones belonging to the orthodox canon or the mainstream media and might well be attacked as conspiracy theory or fake news. This shouldn't surprise anyone. The existence of an orthodox canon is part of the problem, not the solution. Likewise: terming alternative viewpoints as fake news and conspiracy theory isn't terribly helpful either.

An example of this is Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, which explains the First World War in terms of the aims, ambitions and fears of the British Empire, an empire moreover, which, as F. William Engdahl points out in A Century of War, was on the verge of bankruptcy.

What needs to be stated is that there is no plausible, convincing or logical official narrative for the start of the First World War. This fact alone, one hundred years on, is extraordinary and should worry, shock and frighten everyone. Neither Martin Gilbert nor Niall Ferguson nor any other mainstream historian this author has ever read has provided an adequate or cogent explanation. Everybody is at a loss. Everything is cloaked in mystery. Befuddlement, puzzlement and confusion reign supreme.

Both Barbara Tuchman's 1914 and Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers come extremely close but only provide one with clues rather than satisfactory models of reality. The central fact remains, and cannot be denied, that it was the Russians who mobilized first. How, exactly, this came about is the key question of the First World War and Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor provides an extremely plausible explanation for it. The fact that both Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor had to work very much outside of the system and suffered as a direct consequence says much about the deficiencies of academia. Sadly academia cannot be trusted. That one of the foremost scholars in America, Norman Finkelstein, has long been treated so shabbily is simply scandalous.

Similarly, the paucity of information and the narrowness of the remit of the contemporary mainstream media make it