Monday, September 23, 2002

John Pilger rewrites Middle Eastern history to suit his politics, in a British ITV documentary, said to be not only violently biased against Israel and one-sided, but full of false facts and innuendoes. The documentary was sensitively aired a few hours after the end of Yom Kippur, so that British Jews, just having been hopefully forgiven for their sins, were provoked into beginning the new year by sinning before God "by profanation of thy name" and "by impurity of the lips". The network’s chairman, Michael Green, was not amused. Neither was the Israeli embassy.

Just so there wouldn’t be any misunderstandings of his imaginative version of events, Pilger also published an article in the UK Mirror saying, among other things that “Shortly after it was founded in 1948, Israel controlled, mostly as a result of a United Nations partition and partly by force, a total of 78 per cent of historic Palestine”. I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to the world: We are really really really sorry we fought back, when attacked by five regular armies. This was certainly inexcusable violence and we’re so sorry and ashamed we’ve all decided to leave, en masse, right now, all five and a half million of us. We’ve decided Golders Green is a much nicer place to live. See you soon!

“The Palestinian suicide bombers and their mass murder of innocents have hardened Israeli public opinion, but what is seldom reported is that they are a relatively recent phenomenon”. Oh, right, my policeman friend who still has nightmares of the body parts he encountered strewn all over Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv back in 1994 just has an active imagination.

He says that "Nine-tenths of Palestinians killed by the Israelis are civilians; 45 per cent are teenagers and children". this si a particularly wicked distortion. By saying civilians, he obviously means people who do not recieve a salary from any Palestinian security forces, because according to this ICT analysis "Over 50 percent of the Palestinians killed were actively involved in fighting - and this does not include stone-throwers or "unknowns"". And according to the same ICT analysis, 37% of the Palestinian victims were under twenty years old (not 45%). It is reasonable to assume that many Palestinian combatants would be between the ages of 17 and 19, isn’t it? Throwing the statistics for the over-17’s in with the little kiddies is a rather obvious distortion. If you take into account that the percentage of Palestinian female victims, including female children is extremely low, you can see that this was no indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, as Pilger falsely claims.

I couldn’t read it all. Too aggravating.

Pilger , by the way, is adamant that the documentary is completely accurate: "Our historical adviser was one of Israel's most distinguished historians”. The article doesn’t elaborate. Hmmm, I wonder who it could be.