News & Comment
Scant Sympathy from the West for Palestine’s Dead

News

The day after the “Israeli” army killed more than 50 innocent civilians, and wounded thousands, at the site of Palestinian protests next to the defacto Gaza border, a generally respected conservative US media outlet called The Hill posted an incredible opinion piece: “Media goes wild in anti-Trump, anti-Israel fervor.” The writer was complaining about the “Media” based on coverage by the Washington Post headline, “Israelis kill dozens of Palestinians in Gaza protesting U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem” and a minor newspaper called the New York Daily News that ran the headline: “DADDY’S LITTLE GHOUL” in reference to Ivanka Trump’s role in the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

Comment

Benjamin Aaron Shapiro’s claim that the media went “wild” is itself a wild claim as it is based on only 2 media reports, and the only wild thing about yesterday’s events was the orgy of murder committed by the Jewish army against protesters engaged in passive, non-violent resistance to the Jewish occupation and oppression. So far from being “anti-Israel”, the Western media were for the major part simply reporting the death toll and the statements from the Jewish entity and the White House blaming the deaths on the Hamas organization, which governs the Gaza Strip. The Jewish and US narrative was so dominant that the morning after the carnage, the only sympathy that CNN Newsroom anchor, Hana Vaughan Jones, could express was: “We hope that those protests don't turn out to be as deadly and violent as yesterday,” which is a heavily loaded statement as no Jewish deaths or injuries were reported, and there was nothing violent about the demonstrations. The violence was done against them.

The White House praised the Jewish entity, opened its embassy in Jerusalem on the exact 70th anniversary of the ‘Nakba’, the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands, and condemned Palestinians for protesting at a border that strangles the life out of them in a ghetto where poverty, malnutrition and disease are rampant. The Media was most definitely not in an “anti-Israel ferver,” and the US dehumanized the 40,000 Muslim men, women and children who turned out to demonstrate for their rights at the ring of death that looms daily over them.

No further wake-up call should be needed for those who hope that Western sympathy will come to the rescue of Muslims in Palestine or elsewhere. The answers are in our own hands. Our leaders pump billions of dollars to the West to buy weapons that are intended only to kill other Muslims while Trump laughs openly, and those who came before laughed nonetheless. The growing arrogance against Muslims is that of a coward that once feared a sleeping beast, but as its seeming slumber continued the child became bolder, and moved closer to touch it and run back, and then to poke it and then to slap it, and finally to jump and laugh upon its corpse; safe in the notion that it will never rise again. Such are those who desire no good, but what will become of them when the slumberer awakens from his slumber?

Written for the Central media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Dr. Abdullah Robin