|
LATEST NEWS FROM PALESTINE
Female
Palestinian students stand in a Gaza school in silence for the
victims of bombings in the United States, September 13,
2001.
THE
PALESTINIAN PEOPLE, AS A WHOLE, UNFAIRLY PORTRAYED AS
SUPPORTIVE OF THE ATTACKS ON WTC
Written by Nigel
Parry
13 September 2001 -- Yesterday and
today, following the inhumane use of passenger planes as
flying missiles to attack people visiting and working in the
World Trade Center buildings in New York and in the Pentagon
in Washington, most of the media broadcast footage depicting
Palestinians celebrating.
The brief footage was typically
broadcast cyclically and used as an interview aid, with
anchors asking U.S. government officials and others how they
felt about the images.
Almost universally on U.S.
networks, anchors presented the footage as if it were
representative of all Palestinians, additionally failing to
note any context to the images. A number of points must be
made, first about the actual footage:
1. There are three million
Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip and West Bank including
Jerusalem, one million Palestinians living inside the borders
of Israel, and another four million Palestinian refugees
living elsewhere in the world, including the United States.
The footage in question depicted between 20 and 40
individuals.
2. The Palestinians in the footage
were mostly young children. Most of their behaviour in the
footage appeared to be no different from how Palestinian
children always behave when foreign journalists turn up in
their towns, crowding and smiling at the camera and giving the
victory sign that has been a symbol of Palestinian
steadfastness under Israeli military occupation since the
first Intifada in 1987. There is not a single reporter with
any experience of carrying a camera into the Palestinian West
Bank under any circumstance who couldn't get similar footage
on any day they visited the occupied territories.
3. Where genuine rejoicing at the
attacks was indeed apparent in the footage, anchors
interpreting the footage made no effort to offer any context
or background to the images, nor any attempt to separate those
Palestinians portrayed from Palestinians as a whole. A
comparable situation would be television anchors angrily
reacting to scenes of the 1991 riots in Los Angeles, lamenting
that "blacks do not respect law and order", while failing to
note the preceding attack on Rodney King or endemic racial
profiling of the black community in the U.S. by police
forces.
4. The overwhelming number of
Palestinians, like people of all nationalities, were sickened
by the events in New York and Washington. Palestinians with
relatives in New York and Washington spent much of yesterday
worriedly trying to phone to check they were safe, exactly as
many Americans did. Palestinian citizens of the United States
will also turn out to be among the victims of the tragedy.
Whatever a group of 20-40 Palestinian children happened to be
doing yesterday morning in Nablus is no more representative of
all Palestinians than the Klu Klux Klan rally -- which
happened recently just down the road from where I live, in St.
Paul, Minnesota -- is representative of all
Americans.
In addition, there is an
all-important context to the footage of Palestinians broadcast
yesterday that anchors completely failed to
communicate:
1. For the last year now,
Palestinian civilians have been living through a nightmare in
which Israeli occupation forces have been nightly shelling
their towns using tanks, helicopters, and other heavy weapons.
Palestinians do not need a subscription to Jane's Defence
Weekly to learn the origin of these weapons when they can pick
up shell casings from the floors of their homes and from their
backyards with MADE IN THE U.S.A. stamped on them. United
States weaponry supplied to Israel includes:
Heavy weapons: * F-16 fighter
planes, Apache and Cobra attack helicopters, and Reshef patrol
boats to attack Palestinian buildings and vehicles; and *
Armoured pile drivers and armoured bulldozers to destroy
Palestinian homes and agricultural land.
Heavy ammunition: * Naval and tank
artillery including 76mm, 105mm and 120mm high explosive
rounds; * M114 TOW rockets and Hell-Fire air-to-ground
missiles; * Shoulder-fired, anti-armour Light Anti-tank
Weapons (LAW) rocket launchers firing 84mm or 90mm rockets; *
M203 and MK19 grenade launchers; * 40-90 mm mortars; and * A
modified version of the M494 105mm, an anti-personnel cluster
bomb.
Smaller ammunition: * 5.56 mm
bullets for M-16 machine guns; * 7.62 mm high velocity bullets
for general purpose machine guns and Galil sniper rifles; *
12.7 mm bullets for Browning machine guns and Barret sniper
rifles; and * The "less lethal" rubber-coated and
plastic-coated metal bullets.
2. The U.S. weaponry listed above
has not been used proportionally for the purpose of defending
Israel -- as one would hope any military aid is used -- but
rather has been used disproportionally and offensively to kill
over 600 Palestinians, one-third of whom are children, 60
percent of whom were killed outside of clash situations. The
U.S. weaponry listed above has additionally been used to
seriously injure another 15,000 Palestinians, 1,500 of whom
have been crippled for life. That Israel has used "excessive
force" to suppress the current Palestinian uprising against 34
years of its military occupation is a fact according to the
United Nations Security Council, other UN bodies, Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch, Israeli human rights
organisation B'Tselem, and the US State Department. However
offensive the images of the small groups of Palestinians that
were celebrating may be, the fact is that all those depicted
in the images -- if they are under 34 years of age -- have
known nothing but military occupation for the entirity of
their lives. That celebration was a minority reaction of a
people enduring such a situation is a testimony to the
Palestinians' maintainance of human values in a situation
devoid of them.
3. Not only does the United States
sell weapons and ammunition to Israel, but many of these
weapons are supplied as U.S. aid to Israel. A current figure
for U.S. aid currently given to Israel is $3 billion per year,
which includes $1.2 billion in economic aid and $1.8 billion
in military aid. It is difficult to offer this as a conclusive
figure since additional money is given to Israel that is
buried in the budgets of individual government agencies such
as the Defense Department. Every Palestinian is aware that the
U.S. supplies the weapons that Israel uses against them. That
celebration was a minority reaction of a people enduring such
a situation is a testimony to the Palestinians' maintainance
of human values in a situation devoid of them.
4. Every Palestinian is also aware
that their television screens are never filled with images of
Americans protesting the use of their tax dollars to pay for
the missiles that shake their cities and create similarly
distressing scenes of injured and shocked civilians, as seen
yesterday in New York. That celebration was a minority
reaction of a people enduring such a situation is a testimony
to the Palestinians' maintainance of human values in a
situation devoid of them.
The U.S. media broadcast the
footage yesterday without explaining any of the above,
something that is neither new nor -- any longer -- acceptable
in light of the anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and the
anti-Muslim sentiment it creates. No organisation of
journalists who seek to bring their viewers an accurate
representation of reality should be broadcasting contextless,
unrepresentative images that encourage racism against
nationalities and their associated ethnic groups.
In the first few days following the
1995 attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, Arabs
and Muslims in the U.S. reported more than 200 incidents of
harassment, threats and actual violence. According to reports
received by The Electronic Intifada and a press release
yesterday from the Council on American-Islamic Relations there
have already been reports of harassment and attacks against
Arabs and Muslims in the United States. Hate mail and threats
have also been directed at The Electronic Intifada and other
Palestinian, Arab and Muslim websites.
As those of us who live in the U.S.
are currently feeling justifiable anger at the perpetrators
behind yesterday's shocking and horrifying events in New York
and Washington DC, let us not misdirect it at an entire people
who continue to suffer through one of the darkest periods of
their already bleak history. The Palestinian people, who sit
glued to their television sets in disturbed silence like the
rest of the world, are actually better placed than most to
understand what those of us living in America currently feel
and are finding it hard to express.
-------------------
Nigel Parry [Link: http://nigelparry.com/]
lived in the Palestinian West Bank and worked at Birzeit
University from 1994-1998. Today, he lives in St. Paul, MN,
and works on the issue of media coverage of the
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict [Link: http://electronicintifada.net/].
This article was originally published on the website of The
Electronic Intifada [Link: http://electronicIntifada.net/coveragetrends/rejoicing.html].
Mr. Parry can be reached
at nigel@electronicIntifada.net |