Aletho News

Some thoughts on Omar, Jawaher and Isabel

“[The] killing was the third death in the West Bank in a week for which the Palestinians blamed the Israelis.” – NYT

By Seham | Mondoweiss | January 8, 2011

Omar al-Qawsmi and Jawaher Abu Rahmah are this week’s unfortunate symbols of Israeli stupidity and short-sightedness.  And not just those two brutal killings, but all of the actions that we see that defy logic, the law and morality that Israel undertakes, like forcing Palestinians to demolish their own homes, killing Palestinians that drink soda at checkpoints,  imprisoning non-violent activists, depriving children of medical care, raiding universities and imprisoning children. It amounts to a systematic attempt at ethnic cleansing.  They hope that the Palestinians will get fed up and leave but they haven’t figured out that the Palestinians aren’t going anywhere because they have nowhere else to go.  They also fail to grasp that their actions make it possible that the demise of Israel might occur during my lifetime because they can’t seem to look past a day or two into their futures.

Also, I wasn’t surprised that Isabel Kershner of the NYT failed to question the morality or legality of breaking down a door and shooting a man to death as he lay on bed next to his wife because he is a suspected Hamas member.  Maybe she doesn’t know that extra-judicial assassinations are illegal or maybe she doesn’t care because the victim was just a Palestinian.

She seems more concerned in explaining to readers that it was simply a matter of regrettable mistaken identity.  Kershner also tells us that there is bickering among the Palestinians about who is responsible for the slaughter of al-Qawsmi:

The killing also heightened tensions between the authority, which the West backs, and Hamas, its militant Islamist rival. Hamas accused the Palestinian Authority of collaborating with Israel in the case and bearing joint responsibility for the man’s death. The authority has been reining in Hamas activists and militants in the West Bank since the Islamist group, which won Palestinian parliamentary elections in 2006, seized full control of Gaza a year later. There, Hamas has detained loyalists of Fatah, the dominant party of the authority.

And then Kershner goes on to absolve Israel of all of the other murders that were prominent in the news this week:

The other recent deaths include the case of a Palestinian woman, 36, who died last Saturday after inhaling tear gas on the sidelines of a protest the day before in the West Bank, according to her family and Palestinian medical officials.  Initially, Israeli military officials anonymously raised questions about whether those accounts were fabricated; Friday brought the first official comment. The army commander in the West Bank, Brig. Gen. Nitzan Alon, was quoted by Haaretz as saying the woman probably died not from tear gas but from other medical “complications, combined with problems in the medical care she received at the Palestinian hospital.”

On Sunday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed a Palestinian man as he approached a checkpoint in the northern West Bank. The military said that he was holding a glass bottle, and that he had approached the checkpoint in an unauthorized lane and failed to heed orders to stop.

On that note, I end with Malcolm:

The press is so powerful in its image-making role, it can make a criminal look like he’s the victim and make the victim look like he’s the criminal. If you aren’t careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.  — Malcolm X

January 8, 2011 - Posted by aletho | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Supremacism, Social Darwinism