A LESSON IN DEFAMATION…UK PAPER LINKS GAZA TO SABRA-SHATILA
A short lesson in defamation: UK newspaper links Gaza operation to Sabra and Shatila massacre
http://www.robinshepherdonline.com/a-short-lesson-in-defamation-uk-newspaper-links-gaza-operation-to-sabra-and-shatila-massacre/#more-2102
In the latest non-story about Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza last year, Britain’s Independent newspaper splashes an “exclusive†revelation across its front page today from an unnamed “high-ranking†Israeli commander saying that Israel “rewrote the rules of war for Gaza†by putting Palestinian civilians at risk to minimise the risk to Israeli soldiers.
The article is a garbled, evidence-free piece of anti-Israeli opportunism which appears designed to keep the UN’s Goldstone Report on Gaza high in the public consciousness. But the purpose behind the apparent absurdity of making a front page article out of such a flimsy pseudo-exclusive is revealed in an editorial accompanying the report which rehashes one of the most enduring calumnies in the arsenal of Israel’s detractors.
In urging Israel to conduct a full inquiry into Gaza, the paper says it should draw from the example of a previous Israeli investigation in the 1980s:
“The Kahan Commission, which examined the massacre of Palestinian refugees after the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, provides a respectable model. A new Kahan Commission is needed to look into every action of the Israeli military’s behaviour in Gaza, from the testimony of soldiers on the killing of civilians, to the revelations that troops were cheered into battle by extremist rabbis.â€
The Sabra and Shatila massacre, it will be recalled, involved the deliberate slaughter of hundreds of Palestinian civilians in Lebanese refugee camps in September 1982 by an Arab-Christian Phalangist militia group. The Kahan Commission found that Israel bore a degree of indirect responsibility for failing to stop the militia group — which was allied to Israel — from perpetrating the massacre. Direct responsibility for the massacre, of course, belonged to the Arab group that actually conducted it.
However, it has long been a staple of anti-Israeli demonisation to attach full and direct blame for what took place to the Israeli military giving the impression that it was Israel that either did the killing or coordinated it.
This is precisely the game that the Independent is playing. As its editorial team knows all too well, only the smallest minority of readers will know the full details of what took place at Shabra and Shatila. The rest of the readership is left with the clear impression that Israel conducted a terrible massacre in 1982 just as it conducted a terrible massacre during Operation Cast Lead last year.
The techniques of anti-Israeli propaganda are varied. The Independent in recent years has carried the whole gamut from columnists such as Johann Hari who wrote on Israel’s 60th anniversary celebration of his abiding sense of Israel and “the smell of shit†to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown who in January 2009 stated that civilians in Gaza were “slaughtered like animals in an abattoirâ€.
Against that sort of background, today’s offering might seem tame. But that would be to miss the point. The effectiveness of propaganda is inversely proportional to its blatancy. The obscene rantings of Hari and Alibhai-Brown are that much less effective precisely because only the most fanatical of readers can be taken in by them.
It is the drip-drip infusion of the more subtle distortions that really does the damage as week after week and year after a year a portrait of a monster is carefully but quietly drawn.
Comments are closed.
