Hamas,Mickey Mouse and Other Horror Stories

Hamas, Mickey Mouse And
Other Horror Stories:
Those Violent Palestinians Again

By Agustin Velloso

22 May, 2007
Countercurrents.org


The same thing applies to Palestinian violence as to United States democracy: all the news media talk frequently about it but none of them has ever seen it as it really is. The abundance of news aimed at reporting the intrinsic evil of the Palestinians is impressive. Last week one could see at peak viewing time Palestinian pre-school teachers using Mickey Mouse to teach kids they must wipe out Jews, make martyrs of themselves, fight to take over the world and so on. What a headline! What depth of Middle East conflict analysis! Those children and their parents before them have been subjected to constant Israeli bombing for years - attacks that cause dead and wounded by the thousand - and yet, to the leading lights of journalism, what matters, or rather what they are interested in broadcasting, is that the children of these victims are taught from infancy to turn into Islamist terrorists.

Would not the contrary be news, according to a golden rule of the profession? To their tormentors, Palestinian children write poems of love - orphaned by Israeli bombs that have killed their parents, starving hungry thanks to a criminal blockade by Israel and its allies, with no hope of leaving that hell since the United Nations is in no hurry to oblige Israel to abandon the Occupied Territories (after 40 years of illegal occupation now) as it was to force Iraq to abandon Kuwait (after 6 months).

In that same week an Israeli soldier, in a punishment operation in Nablus, killed an unborn Palestinian whose mother is still lying wounded in hospital. Maha Katouri, a 30 year old Palestinian mother lost the child in her womb, seven months into the pregnancy, to a bullet that perforated her abdomen and destroyed her unborn baby's head. Non-news is that the Israeli soldier who fired the shot is in Occupied Palestinian territory illegally: non-news also are his orders to shoot to kill
Palestinians, including women and children in their houses, not because Israel faces non-existent Arab aggression, but rather to contribute, death by death, captive by captive, eviction by eviction, to the genocide of the Palestinians. For the international community the latest anniversary of the final solution of the Jewish Question which ended with the complete defeat of the Nazi regime is news. Non-news is the continuing final solution of the Palestinian Question, begun with the establishment of Israel and which every Israeli government since 1948 has continued with the blessing of that same international community.

Just-barely-news is that the same week a dozen Palestinians have died and many more have been wounded at Israel's hands. Non-news is that the remainder suffers the effects of an international economic blockade applied to a population under military
occupation by a member country of the United Nations. Also non-news is that every last bullet has been paid for by the United States which subsidises Israel's
army of occupation with US$3 billion a year.

News is the falsehood that Condi Rice travels to Jerusalem to promote peace. Non-news is that the European Union approves Israel's genocidal policy, since it does nothing to make Israel respect UN resolutions and international humanitarian law. News is that the European Union does not talk with the Hamas government, which has not occupied Israel and has not broken international law, because purportedly it includes extremists.

Non-news is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children receive daily from the Israeli Mickey Mouse throughout their lives an education far more effective
than one that even the most intelligent Palestinian teacher could not devise: Occupier education. This teaches them the Occupier is much stronger than the
occupied and thus to abandon the land the Occupier covets or take the consequences, which are non-news or old news: a wall that condemns them to live in a prison, demolition house by house to make way for colonies exclusively for Jews, the loss of means to make a living so that they emigrate and, above all, prison (Israeli prisons hold 11,000 Palestinian captives) and death (5000 Palestinian dead since 2000)
for resisting all the foregoing.

Non-news is that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian children grow up traumatized by the extreme violence to which they are subjected by the fourth most powerful army in the world, equipped with F-16 fighter bombers, Merkava tanks and snipers whom Israel daily sends into the Occupied Territories to fire on the unarmed civilian population. News, on the other hand, is that Israeli children in Sderot suffer psychological stress from Qassam rockets, whose minimal destructive capacity, however, is non-news: a total of seven people in Israel have died from 4500 launches since 2001. Non-news too is that between ten and twenty Palestinians regularly die from a single Israeli missile.

It is unreasonable for these journalists and editors to report stress suffered by children in Sderot but not that of Palestinian children. Nor is it credible that these reporters and opinion-formers cannot work out that the ambience of extreme violence in which Palestinian children live not only explains why they sing songs that help them endure the terror they live through, but also that it is the inevitable result of Israel's criminal policies. It is impossible to understand that the news is not the friendly Mickey Mouse as a teaching aid for Palestinian kids, but
rather the terrifying Israeli soldier that shoots them point blank.

So why then do they publish news as they do?Because they are supporters of Israel, racist towards Palestinians and anti-Islamic or all these at once. Except to those unwilling to see, this is so obvious that its demonstration has not even needed the mention in this article of what some might say is fundamental: that the Mickey Mouse news item is a fake. Its falsity parallels the fraud used years ago to justify the
first attack on Iraq: that Iraqis were killing newborns by tearing them from incubators. The daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in the United States enjoyed
a universal audience to watch her weep as she related this event, which existed entirely in her imagination. The correction of her false witness was much more
discreet.

The Palestinian Mickey Mouse story is yet one more of the numerous lies disseminated by Israel and taken as it stood by Western journalists. The translation of
the Mickey Mouse words, again, as happens with statements about Israel attributed to Ahmedinejad and in other cases too, is corrupt. But which news outlet is going to ask for an explanation from the people who distributed it? Which TV presenter is going to
publicly admit they were fooled? Which chief editor is going to confess that they failed to check the - obviously Israeli - source?