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An Eye For An Eyelash: The Gaza Massacre - Part 1

Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Posted in Commentary | Tagged Commentary

On March 24, 1999, an emotional Tony Blair appealed to the House of Commons and to the people of Britain: “We must act to save thousands of innocent men, women and children from humanitarian catastrophe.” Blair described the emergency: “Let me give the House an indication of the scale of what is happening: a quarter of a million Kosovars, more than 10 per cent of the population, are now homeless as a result of repression by Serb forces… Since last summer 2000 people have died.” (Blair: ‘We must act - to save thousands of innocent men, women and children,’ The Guardian, March 23, 1999; www.guardian.co.uk/Kosovo/Story/0,,209876,00.html)

Not even Blair claimed all the killings had been on one side. George Robertson, the UK Defence Secretary at the time of the crisis, testified before the House of Commons that until mid-January 1999, “the Kosovo Liberation Army [KLA] was responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than the Serbian authorities had been”. (Quoted, Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival, Routledge, 2003, p.56)

The Guardian rallied to Blair’s cause:

“The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect the people of Kosovo… If we do not act at all, or if there is a limited bombing campaign which still fails to change Milosevic’s mind, what is likely to be Kosovo’s future?” (Leader, ‘The sad need for force, Kosovo must be saved,’ The Guardian, March 23, 1999)

The following day, NATO began its 78-day blitz of Serbia.

Ten yeArs later and almost one-half of the 2,000 death toll that so horrified Blair and the Guardian in 1999 has been reached by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) in its massacre of 890 Palestinians in just over two weeks. Some 3,800 more have been wounded. The current slaughter is far more one-sided than Kosovo. There have so far been 3 Israeli civilian deaths and 10 soldiers killed: 4 of these were victims of their own ‘friendly fire’.

KLA attacks did nothing to temper media outrage at the spectacle of the Serbian state attacking tiny Kosovo. The focus was on Serbian “massacres” and “genocide”. The Observer wrote of the alleged killing of 45 Albanian civilians in Racak by Serb armed forces on January 16, 1999:

“History will judge that the defining moment for the international community took place on 16 January this year… Albanians returning after an attack by Serb security forces discovered the bodies of men they had left behind to look after the houses.” (Peter Beaumont, Justin Brown, John Hooper, Helena Smith and Ed Vulliamy, ‘Hi-tech war and primitive slaughter - Slobodan Milosevic is fighting on two fronts,’ The Observer, March 28, 1999)

Serb forces, the Observer wrote, were “pursuing their own version of a Balkan Final Solution”. (Ibid.)

In 1999, British and American media were full of talk of “genocide” in Kosovo. A Nexis database search showed that between 1998-1999 the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek and Time used “genocide” 220 times to describe Serb actions in Kosovo. (Email from Edward Herman to Media Lens, August 27, 2002)

We have found no examples of a British journalist describing Israeli actions as “genocidal” over the last month. Daily Mail columnist Melanie Phillips made rare use of the word on January 5:

“Many others also share the view that Israel is in the wrong. So why is a country [Israel] under attack from genocidal fanatics pilloried for defending its citizens against slaughter?” (Phillips, ‘Yes, this war is terrible. But the alternative was worse - for us all,’ Daily Mail, January 5, 2009)

Israel’s massacre is presented as a “war”, as a “Gaza conflict” between two sides engaged in “fighting”. This is the standard fiction, as Tim Llewellyn, the BBC’s former Middle East Correspondent, noted five years ago:

“In the news reporting of the domestic BBC TV bulletins, ‘balance’, the BBC’s crudely applied device for avoiding trouble, means that Israel’s lethal modern army is one force, the Palestinians, with their rifles and home-made bombs, the other ‘force‘: two sides equally strong and culpable in a difficult dispute, it is implied, that could easily be sorted out if extremists on both sides would see reason and the leaders do as instructed by Washington…” (Llewellyn, ‘Why the BBC Ducks the Palestinian Story - Part 1,’ Media Lens, January 15, 2004; www.medialens.org/alerts/ 04/040115_Ducking_Palestine_1.HTM)

To read the rest of this media alert, please go to:

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/index.php