Israel/Palestine

Tace

(6,800 posts) Sun Oct 18, 2015, 11:34 AM Oct 2015

Of Course, It is an Intifada: This is What You Must Know | Ramzy Baroud

Ramzy Baroud -- World News Trust

Oct. 13, 2015

When my book Searching Jenin was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word "massacre" on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based "terrorists."

The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.

This kind of reductionism has often served as the prelude to any discussion concerning the so-called Arab-Israeli conflict: events are depicted and defined using polarizing terminology that pay little heed to facts and contexts, and focus primarily on perceptions and interpretations.

Hence, it should also matter little to those same individuals whether or not Palestinian youth such as Isra’ Abed, 28, shot repeatedly on Oct. 9 in Affula -- and Fadi Samir, 19, killed by Israeli police a few days earlier -- were, in fact, knife-wielding Palestinians who were in a state of self-defense and shot by the police. Even when video evidence emerges countering the official Israeli narrative and revealing, as in most other cases, that the murdered youth posed no threat, the official Israeli narrative will always be accepted as facts, by some. Isra’, Fadi, and all the rest are "terrorists" who endangered the safety of Israeli citizens and, alas, had to be eliminated as a result.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/of-course-it-is-an-intifada-this-is-what-you-must-know-ramzy-baroud