By Paul Mirbach
I do not believe in personal attacks. They fulfil no purpose and are often the last resort of someone who cannot present a suitable argument. This is why I think the best way to deal with a writer like John Pilger is to expose his sophistry and his abuse of facts.
I am referring to his latest article “Breaking the last taboo – Gaza and the threat of world war,” which was adapted from his Edward Said Memorial Lecture, delivered in Adelaide on 11 September 2014.
From the onset, he is in dramatic mode. The attack on Gaza was an attack on all of us. The siege on Gaza is a siege of all of us, he brazenly asserts.
Such poignant identification with the innocent victim, right? It’s a pity that Pilger forgets to mention that the attack on Gaza followed the kidnapping and brutal murder of three unarmed teenagers by Hamas operatives. Nor does he care that Israeli civilians were bombarded by rockets from Hamas-controlled Gaza. Pilger’s aim is to paint Operation Protective Edge as an unwarranted act of aggression. For every other country in the world, having 185 rockets fired on its civilians would serve as casus belli. For Israel, though, its response is deemed an unjustifiable act of aggression. But to mention the fact that Israel’s war against Hamas was a defensive war doesn’t do his op-ed much good, so he chooses to omit it.
He continues: The denial of justice to Palestinians is a symbol of much of humanity.
The writer forgets to mention that the Palestinian calls for ‘justice’ has a sinister addendum: genocide and the destruction of an entire country, Israel. You see, for the Palestinians, justice is a Palestine from the river to the sea. How much place does that leave for Israel? Not much. What will become of the Jews living there at the moment? Good question. One which Mr. Pilger chooses not to even address, let alone answer.
Nothing has changed since the Zionists’ infamous ‘Plan D in 1948 that ethnically cleansed an entire people, he writes.
I call on Pilger to substantiate this irresponsible claim. “Ethnic cleansing,” as in genocide? Firstly, he uses the past tense. I challenge him to prove this claim that this happened at all. Now here are some facts: At the end of the War of Independence, there remained in Israel 550,000 Arabs. If there was any truth about Plan D, as the writer claims, why would Israel leave intact a sizeable Arab population? In Israel today, not including Judea-Samaria (and Gaza), there live 2.5 million Arabs, the vast majority of whom are Muslims. You can do your own math as to the effectiveness of Israel’s ethnic cleansing. How is it that these targets for ethnic cleansing have risen to the status of high court judges, Knesset members, senior civil servants of government offices, heads of departments at Israeli universities and hospitals?
Now, let’s consider the Palestinians in Judea-Samaria and Gaza. There are currently 4.4 million Arabs. Gaza has the highest birth rate in the world, at 2.9 per cent a year. That is almost a third higher than before 1967. Does that sound like effective ethnic cleansing to you? Israel has the strongest army in the region, with the most effective statistics in the use of its weapons. Are you telling me that if Israel really wanted to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians, it could not do so?
Now let us turn our attention, just for a minute, to the results of real ethnic cleansing. In the Rwanda conflict between 800,000 to one million Tutsi died, in the space of eight years. In Bosnia, 100,000 Muslims were murdered within three years. In the Second World War, about 6,000,000 Jews perished in the death camps in the space of six years. According to figures provided by human rights group B’Tselem, fewer than 8,000 Palestinian were killed between 1948 and 2012. This includes the 1,593 casualties as a result of intra-Palestinian rivalry.
Pilger’s sophistry and the way he manipulates his readers is something to behold. He employs a very effective tactic of mixing vivid emotive detail alongside vagueness. He does this so that no one can call him out and refute what he writes as ‘facts.’ How can you refute what he writes if the reader does not know when, where or how these terrible so-called atrocities happened? Pilger exploits this gap in understanding and takes advantage of those who are uninformed. In other words, Pilger is a master of misrepresentation. Consider this:
For years, reporters have watched Israeli soldiers bait Palestinian children by abusing them through loud-speakers. Then they shoot them dead.
Could it perhaps be that the loudspeakers are actually calling on all the people to evacuate the area ahead of an impending attack? I can personally vouch that this is what the soldiers are doing because I have been in a similar situation. Is that what he means by “baiting” and “abuse”? Why were the children shot? He would have you believe that they were shot in cold blood, for doing absolutely nothing at all, just hanging around. He does not bother to describe the fact that this happened, for instance, in the heat of a violent riot, where Molotov cocktails were thrown at the soldiers, or that the soldiers were shot at from within a heaving crowd of rioters. Nor does he bother allow you to think anything else other than that these children were the intended targets, not unfortunate ‘collateral damage.’ Since he does not provide you with the circumstances, he allows no room for rebuttal. That is twisting the facts to suit one’s agenda.
For years, reporters have known about Palestinian women about to give birth and refused passage through a roadblock to a hospital; and the baby has died, and sometimes the mother.
Does this sound at all logical? Pilger fails to mention that these ambulances have been used by the Palestinians in the past to smuggle suicide belts and terrorists into Israel. Pilger’s failure to enlighten his readers on the reasons behind the roadblocks and the inspections of ambulances is an intentional attempt at misleading his readers. In addition, pregnant women themselves, have been suicide bombers, exploiting their condition to infiltrate Israel.
For years, reporters have known about stricken people prevented from getting life-saving treatment, or shot dead when they’ve tried to reach a clinic for chemotherapy treatment. One elderly lady with a walking stick was murdered in this way – a bullet in her back.
Firstly, there are 54 hospitals in the West Bank, with room for 43,800 beds. This begs the question why the Palestinians need to enter Israel to go to a hospital? Pilger does not provide the time or place, not the circumstances or the incident for the reader, intentionally making it difficult for one to rebut his accusation. There is one example of a time when Israeli troops fired on a car traveling down a West Bank road (which was closed to Palestinians), killing a 95-year-old Palestinian woman. What is described must be put in the context of the second intifada, in which over 1,500 Israeli civilians were killed in hundreds of terrorist attacks by suicide bombers, car bombs and drive-by shootings. In this instance, the road was closed to civilian use. It was dark. Therefore, the soldiers were not able to see who was sitting in the car. There had already been terrorist attacks on that road. The driver of the car was acting suspiciously and did not stop when called to do so. Warning shots were fired. When the car continued traveling at speed towards them, the soldiers probably felt that it was a terrorist attack and fired. All this does not interest Pilger. As long as he evokes the image of cruel, bloodthirsty Israelis, then that is enough for him. A curious detail is Pilger’s mention of the walking stick. The fact that she was in a car means the walking stick is an emotive prop.
In one of my films, a Palestinian cameraman, Imad Ghanem, lies helpless while soldiers from the “most moral army in the world” blew both his legs off.
Again, where is the context? He would have you believe that this reporter was sitting in a coffee house, sipping coffee, when out of the blue, a big, black helicopter suddenly appeared and released a hellfire rocket into the coffee house. Then, seeing poor Ghanem lying helpless, the pilot, from a distance of hundreds of meters, took aim and blew his legs off. Is it not more conceivable that the reporter was in the middle of an extremely violent conflict and just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? We will never know, since the writer does not want you to know. He just wants you to feel the outrage.
Hamas has repeatedly offered a 10-year truce with Israel and has long settled for a two-state solution.
This is so preposterous that it is hard to find words to counter such a claim. So I will let Hamas spokesman Yehya Musa refute Pilger in a statement made in 2013: “We will never agree to giving the Zionist state one inch of the land of Palestine.”
The unforgivable crime of Hamas is a distinction almost never reported: it is the only Arab government to have been freely and democratically elected by its people.
These elections were held in 2006. Eight years have passed since then. There has not been another election. For how long can one hold onto the mantra of “democratically elected” if there has not been a subsequent election for such a long time? Add to the mix the Hamas overthrow of PLO personnel in the violent civil war of 2007. In that war, Hamas militants went into hospitals and killed PLO wounded lying in their beds, one by one, and making certain no one got out alive. True, democratic behaviour, right? What about the public hangings and summary public executions of gays and so-called Israeli collaborators. Not very democratic, is it?
Resistance is humanity at its bravest and most noble, says Pilger. Let us examine this bravery. 14,000 rockets fired deliberately at civilian targets from miles away, and from within civilian population centres, schools and mosques. The targets include families celebrating Passover in a hotel, teenagers waiting outside a disco, women and children having breakfast on a Friday morning in a coffee shop, customers at a pizza place, children in a school bus. Does that sound brave to you? Using one’s own population as human shields, often by force, and then crying to the world in outrage when the human shields are killed in retaliation about “genocide”. Is that noble? Pilger has a very warped sense of nobility. It seems to he has confused it with perfidy.
The resistance in Gaza is rightly compared with the 1943 Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto – which also dug tunnels and deployed tactics of subterfuge and surprise against an overpowering military machine.
One difference the writer fails to enlighten his readers about: the Jews in the ghetto were fighting for their lives against an enemy that had already outlined a plan for a Final Solution for their entire annihilation. The tunnels dug were in order to attack Nazi soldiers who were sending them off to the death camps. The Hamas tunnels were dug under civilian settlements, kibbutzim and moshavim with the express purpose of killing innocent, unarmed men, women and children. Those not killed were to be kidnapped and held for ransom, without access to the Red Cross or any other international aid organization. How does that compare? It is a spurious comparison meant to mislead the reader.
In conclusion, I will say this about Pilger. He may have started out as a journalist. He may have even won awards for journalism that he honestly earned. However, when a journalist trades on his reputation to further his own biased agenda and flouts all the ethics which are supposed to make journalism reliable, then he crosses a line which cheapens all his previous accomplishments. This is what Pilger has done. He exploits the fact that the majority of his readers are uninformed about the Israel-Palestine conflict (and the wider Arab-Israel conflict) to unscrupulously influence their opinions, using manipulations of facts and incidents, which he ensures cannot be verified. In this way he thinks that he can place himself above being called out for the charlatan of truth that he has become. I think it is fair to say that the arch-propagandist Joseph Goebbels could have learned a thing or two from Mr John Pilger.
