When the corporate media explain the logic behind Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, they turn to what Israel says officially and publicly. For example, today’s New York Times, in an article on an Israeli government-backed investigation into the deadly Israeli raid on a flotilla heading to Gaza, states:
Israel argues that the blockade is necessary to prevent Hamas from smuggling in weapons or materials needed to make them, and to weaken Hamas control.
This sounds similar to a statement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (Ha’aretz, 6/1/10), who justified the siege by saying:
Gaza is a terror state funded by the Iranians, and therefore we must try to prevent any weapons from being brought into Gaza by air, sea and land.
But the Israelis must know that the blockade has not accomplished this, as materials for weapons are reportedly smuggled in to Gaza via underground tunnels that go from Egypt to Gaza (Newsweek, 6/7/10).
So if the blockade is not working, why does it still exist? A recent article that appeared in McClatchy Newspapers (6/9/10) puts the Israeli logic behind blockading Gaza this way:
In response to a lawsuit by Gisha, an Israeli human rights group, the Israeli government explained the blockade as an exercise of the right of economic warfare.
“A country has the right to decide that it chooses not to engage in economic relations or to give economic assistance to the other party to the conflict, or that it wishes to operate using ‘economic warfare,'” the government said.
McClatchy obtained the government’s written statement from Gisha, the Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which sued the government for information about the blockade. The Israeli high court upheld the suit, and the government delivered its statement earlier this year.
Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, said the documents prove that Israel isn’t imposing its blockade for its stated reasons, but rather as collective punishment for the Palestinian population of Gaza.
The revelation that Israel’s blockade is not about security and actually about punishing the Palestinians for putting Hamas in power isn’t new, though. Dov Weisglass, an adviser to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, infamously said (Guardian, 4/16/06) that the purpose of the economic sanctions against Gaza is to “put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Israel has also characterized the purpose behind the siege as one that promotes “no prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis” in Gaza (FAIR Blog, 6/4/10).
These frank admissions that the blockade of Gaza is designed to punish its civilian population, however, are missing from the majority of our media outlets. A Nexis search only turns up mentions of the Israeli government document about “economic warfare” in publications associated with McClatchy. And before the document was revealed, the Weisglass comment was rarely mentioned in the U.S. media. Perhaps U.S. media outlets think that reporting that Israel is engaged in collective punishment is too harsh for American ears.
So, the “corporate media” is not supposed to believe the Israeli information about the blockade, but they are supposed to believe the information from Hamas?
I am curious, how are we supposed to know who to believe?
Israel actually wants Hamas to smuggle in weapons. This justifies Israel counter attacks, justifies the blockade, and justifies American aid and support.
Rocks and suicide bombers against U.S. funded, sophisticated weapons?!!! Who are the terrorists? When I was a kid, I learned in Mormon Sunday school that the church supported the establishment of the Jewish state of Israel. I heard over and over how Palestinians were killed or kicked off their land to impose this state. The humiliation continues and Hamas represents the anger. // Jean Clelland-Morin
Maybe FAIR should get a consistent philosophy re Israel. And for heaven’s sake, stop elevating people like Howard Kurtz to the level of the note-worthy.
Who Knew? We all knew but, were unable to decide what to do or if we wanted to risk doing anything. So when the press doesn’t publish reminders we could “forget” what we knew and dont make any decision about action. Then we are “surprised” again when the information is reiterated at later time and we go through the same process of not deciding and “forgetting”.
The technique behind the “BIG LIE” would probably work just as well for “BIG TRUTHS” !!
We all know the drill- repeat, repeat, repeat-especially repeat the same keyword(s) on successive days/weeks.
Take the example of the words “Oil Spill”. Do we really have a spill or a ruptured pipe connected directly to an oil geyser(the well)?
“So, the “corporate media” is not supposed to believe the Israeli information about the blockade, but they are supposed to believe the information from Hamas? I am curious, how are we supposed to know who to believe?”
Where is Hamas quoted in this article? Where is it suggested that Hamas should be considered a reliable media source?
So, when Netanyahu says “Gaza is a terror state funded by the Iranians, and therefore we must try to prevent any weapons from being brought into Gaza by air, sea and land…” the innate even-handedness of the MSM should be reporting “on the other hand, the Iranians claim that Israel is terrorist beach-head established by the Euro-American bloc, with an eye to promoting control of oil & other resources in Arabia & Western Asia…”
Right? ^..^
John Browne, you are right. Why don’t they do that? None of them are fair and balanced and that’s why FAIR is there.
to John Browne: “Bingo!”
See Sunday Aug 1 NYTimes opinion piece by a US citizen (and soldier) who had “twice boots” on the ground in Afghanistan: “Learning from WikiLeaks”.
His conclusion: “Yet we do not need to maintain 100,000 troops in Afghanistan or create a sparkling democracy. We simply need to maintain the intelligence structure and military capacity that already exists, and put the power to defeat the insurgents in the hands of the locals.”
“We simply need to maintain the intelligence structure and military capacity that already exists.”
Does that sound anything like our goal in Iraq: 14 “enduring” bases (i.e., permanent) in Iraq plus the Fortress America in Baghdad. Empire “lite” in Afghanistan?
And of course the more troubling acceptance of the false premise for the Afghan and Iraq invasions & occupations generally, namely, What actually happened on 9/11/2001, and whodunnit? Mere common sense, without further input, tells everyone that the three (3) buildings in the WTC that blew up (#1 & #2) and the one that blew down (#7) had the benefit of very sophisticated nano-explosives and probably computer-guided triggering mechanisms. Probably ditto the flying thing that poked a hole in the Pentagon’s most heavily fortified wall, though that seems to have been merely a missile.
“Without these human intelligence collectors, communications experts and small-scale military operations, we would free the Taliban in Pakistan to focus on overthrowing the government in Islamabad. If they were to accomplish that feat, Al Qaeda would be given all the time it needs to reconstitute its network and undertake more attacks against the United States and its allies.”
Though the author, Mitchell LaFortune, doesn’t expressly say that Al Qaeda was behind the 9/11/01 attack, I think it’s safe to say that he implied, or guides us to infer, that it was. And that assumption has never been proven.
We might have hoped that a public, federal trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (sp?) or KSM, would have given all of us an opportunity to test that theory of causation in an adversarial procedure, laced with the power of subpoena, subpoenas duces tecum and the other tools of “discovery” available to the defense in any ol’ run-of-the-mill trial. But my hunch is that KSM will never have a public trial, because the risk of full disclosure of the actions of all parties to “the day” is too great.