Making Arab Kids A Focal Point Of The Propaganda War Against Israel

The propaganda war is a war where words are bullets and lies are the missiles and rifles (and knives and cars). Minnesota representative, Betty McCollum (Dem), decided to join that war and she put forward a new bill calling on the USA to fight the civil rights abuses committed by Israel against Palestinian children. Al Jazeera writes that:

The bill would prohibit funds going to a slew of practices considered illegal under international law, including sensory deprivation, death threats, torture, physical violence, solitary confinement, denial of access to relatives and council and imprisonment without charge or trial.

Such abuses have been claimed by pro-Palestinian activists and I have no way of knowing their veracity at this time. The Israel Police spokesperson has not yet returned my call. I can believe that kids are held without charge or trial — for a time — and that they are denied access to relatives — for a time — and even that should not happen. But I do not believe the former listed abuses actually occur and I would like to hear why the latter do.

Jennifer Bing, Palestine-Israel programme director for the American Friends Service Committee , was quoted in the same article as saying:

No children should be subjected to night raids, solitary confinement, interrogation without legal representation, or physical and mental abuse that are routinely practiced by the Israeli army in the West Bank.

Problem is, it is made to appear that such things, when they happen, happen in a vacuum. That they happen just because the Israelis are evil military occupiers, European colonial implants (we are not, but that point is belaboured by countless anti-Israel activists as if it were true).

I would also like Bing to define what she means by “routinely practiced”. Does it mean every day? once a week? once a month? Does it mean that whenever Israeli soldiers come in contact with Palestinian Arab kids it is always to detain them? It would be helpful to the reader to be able to understand the context, but I doubt that Bing is interested in mentioning what triggers night raids and arrest of minors: Intelligence that someone in that home is planning or has committed a terrorist act, or catching the kid approaching Israelis with a knife drawn or just after having stabbed someone or thrown a rock at their heads or cars. But that would dilute the narrative of those who want to paint Israelis evil.

The article mentions two specific cases in order to illustrate the point:

In September, an Israeli military court sentenced16-year-old Lama al-Bakri to prison time and fined her 6,000 shekels ($1,750) over an alleged attack in December 2015, when she was shot and detained after reportedly attempting to carrying out a stabbing at the Kiryat Arba settlement in the West Bank.

Interesting use of the words, alleged and reportedly, when writing about a case that had already been tried in a court of law. The court determined that Lama was guilty of this crime. Pro-Palestinians quite conveniently apply to Israeli courts when they want to protest what they feel are acts of Jewish discrimination or worse against them and then ignore rulings of the same Israeli courts as irrelevant when they want to score propaganda points.

Second case used by Al Jazeera to protest Israeli maltreatment of Arab kids:

Also in September, an Israeli military court sentenced two Palestinian children to 18 years in prison for allegedly executing a stabbing attack in the East Talpiyot settlement in Jerusalem in May 2016. A third child was sentenced to more than two years in prison for allegedly helping plan the attack, the Palestinian news agency Ma’an reported at the time.

Again use of the word, allegedly. In this case there are actual video tapes showing the two kids running with knives.

So here we have an instance of video tapes used by pro-Palestinian propagandists when they can show Israeli crimes and misdemeanours (such as the case of Elor Azaria) and ignored when they show instances of Arab crimes and misdemeanours.

Painting Israel apartheid and racist is easy when making statements such as the following:

More than 500,000 Israelis live in Jewish-only settlements across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, according to the Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

What would the Al Jazeera reader say to the fact that Arab towns in Israel will not sell or lease homes to Jews, and not even to other Arabs from different clans? Is it okay for Arabs to exclude Jews? Is that not racist or apartheid? What would the reader say about the fact that in the free Palestine that they dream of, Jews will not be allowed to own land or even reside?

This propaganda war is a war cry for the extermination of the Jews. No holds barred. Not even sending kids out with knives and rocks in their hands (that they seem to start practising at an early age) and then using against Israel the only response there can be to kids with knives and rocks in their hands.

Feature Image Credit: Pixabay