The Western media has chosen not to run the graphic pictures of the children killed in Gaza this weekend (nota bene: this is not the picture above, which shows members of the Daloo family during the children’s funeral yesterday).
Priest Giles Fraser asks: do pictures of children killed in Gaza force us to face a gruesome reality?
Let’s start slowly, carefully, with what can be said. Photographs show four small children dead on the cold aluminium surface of the morgue.
They are positioned in such a way that they look like they might be sleeping together. Are these pictures real? Are they staged? That already feels too suspicious a question to be asking so early on. And one’s emotional instincts will rail against the premature engagement of critical faculties. But one needs to bracket out the feelings just for a moment.
Earlier photographs have come in from multiple reputable agencies showing these children being pulled out of the rubble. Other images show numerous film crews witnessing the same event. The children’s bodies are accompanied by the press to the morgue. Those who are trained to spot discrepancies in this sort of story believe that it hangs together. The pictures are real, so it is concluded. And once that is accepted, one immediately feels more than a little uncomfortable that their provenance was ever questioned. Like disbelieving a rape victim when she first tells you her story.
So they are real. Dead children, killed by an Israeli missile while still in their pyjamas and the sort of clothes suited to playing in the street. The western media has chosen not to show them.
Read the rest here.
Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
Mitt Romney, a privileged white man worth a quarter of a billion dollars who has sheltered his money from taxes in Bermuda, the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, and who never misses a square meal, stooped to a new obscene low in blaming the victim on Monday by slamming the Palestinians for not being richer. Palestinian politician Saeb Erekat characterized Romney’s remarks as “racist,” but even that was charitable. Evil, is more like it.
Mitt Romney should read about the success of the Palestinians who immigrated to El Salvador in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. El Salvador isn’t a powerful economic nation but the Palestinian minority has been very successful and during the civil war some Palestinian descendants were among the leaders of the FMLN, specifically Schafik Jorge Handal Handal.
Deborah Lipstadt doesn’t pull any punches in her piece about the controversy that erupted this year over a moment of silence to remember the Israeli Olympic athletes murdered in Munich in 1972:
The athletes who were murdered were from Israel and were Jews—that is why they aren’t being remembered. The only conclusion one can draw is that Jewish blood is cheap, too cheap to risk upsetting a bloc of Arab nations and other countries that oppose Israel and its policies.
I have long inveighed against the tendency of some Jews to see anti-Semitism behind every action that is critical of Israel or of Jews. In recent years some Jews have been inclined to hurl accusations of anti-Semitism even when they are entirely inappropriate. By repeatedly crying out, they risk making others stop listening—especially when the cry is true.
Here the charge is absolutely accurate. This was the greatest tragedy to ever occur during the Olympic Games. Yet the IOC has made it quite clear that these victims are not worth 60 seconds. Imagine for a moment that these athletes had been from the United States, Canada, Australia, or even Germany. No one would think twice about commemorating them.
HT: Steven Abraham.
After watching the opening ceremony, they could have and should have evoked or incorporated the Israeli Olympic athletes murdered in Munich in 1972 into their moment of silence. It would have taken nothing away from the event and it would have added a wealth of knowledge and solidarity for an event that many today, 40 years later, still immediately associate with the Olympics.
![Palestinian soccer player Mahmoud Al-Sarsak waves to people upon his arrival in Gaza City July 10, 2012. Israel released the Gaza soccer player on Tuesday in a deal to end his intermittent four-month hunger strike after he spent three years behind bars without being put on trial, officials said.
I don’t know all of the details about why he was held but being the hardcore football enthusiast that I am, this is great. Of course, the bad news is that those are three formative years that he’ll never have back but the good news is that he’s still young (24/25) so he can still play football for years to come and hopefully he does.
It should be noted that plenty of people within FIFA (including Sepp Blatter), UEFA, FIFPro, former footballing legends and others were pressuring Israel to free Mahmoud Al-Sarsak. [EI]
The Guardian has a video at this link. [The Guardian]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m6yayfANdE1qz7wpso1_1280.jpg)
Palestinian soccer player Mahmoud Al-Sarsak waves to people upon his arrival in Gaza City July 10, 2012. Israel released the Gaza soccer player on Tuesday in a deal to end his intermittent four-month hunger strike after he spent three years behind bars without being put on trial, officials said.
I don’t know all of the details about why he was held but being the hardcore football enthusiast that I am, this is great. Of course, the bad news is that those are three formative years that he’ll never have back but the good news is that he’s still young (24/25) so he can still play football for years to come and hopefully he does.
The Guardian has a video at this link. [The Guardian]
Even the most impassioned boycottista would have to acknowledge that clearing a Brooklyn store’s shelves of a few items would be a symbolic act and would hardly put a dent in Israel’s economy or sway its leaders to sign a peace agreement. But, the boycottistas suggest, even if banishing Israeli marshmallows from West Brooklyn will not shake things up in the West Bank, the important thing is that the co-op could make a collective statement against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.In fact, boycott supporters were primarily making a statement about themselves. Because, these days, being Against Israel and Caring About Palestine have become moral markers in some Western circles. In places like Park Slope, boycotting Israeli products is now a lifestyle choice, much like using canvas bags and shunning plastic, eating organic and avoiding “junk” foods, or recycling instead of just throwing away your trash.”
