Friday, July 28, 2006

My First Fisking- John Pilger.

John Pilger has a piece up at Comment is Free titled 'Hizbullah Are Heroes' (I'm not making that up).
Remember Kosovo and the rest of the stricken Balkans? Remember the Kurds in northern Iraq? What moving dispatches those crises generated in the West, together with such damnation for their tormentors. According to my memory, they were each called "the most moral cause of our generation." There was no question, said the crusaders, of right and wrong; they were firmly on the side of right, along with Blair and Clinton and their generals. How silent are these crusaders now, their selective compassion reserved demonstrably for causes of state, "our" causes.
Yes John I do remember Kosovo, where thousands of civilians were being intentionally killed, I also remember that unlike your response to a few hundred civilians being accidently killed in Lebabnon by Israel in pursuit of a terrorist group, you were rather relaxed about Milosevic's actions.
Before our eyes, the Israeli regime (it is never called a regime, of course)

Googling ;Israeli regime' brings tens of thousands of results.
is set upon destroying an entire country, deliberately killing civilians, almost half of whom are children

So how come the casualty figures are so low, just a few hundred deaths. If Israel wished to kill civilans they could have killed the sort of numbers Pilger excuses when it happens in Bosnia or Kosovo.
and the crusaders are as quiet as mice or they are busy toiling in the great quarry of obsfucation

Crusaders, mice, quarries?
I spotted one of them yesterday contributing to a report about Condaleeza Rice - the modern Ribbentrop

The inevitable USA- Nazi Germany comparison gets made, we all knew it was coming.
she was said to have "embarked on a mission to the Middle East to stitch together a peace plan". I read that twice and asked myself how was it was possible for Rice (or "Condi") to achieve her "mission" when the unabashed mission of her government was to aggressively back and collude with the Israelis

It is quite simple, you achieve peace by defeating the organisation which launched the war by kidnapping and mudering Israeli soldiers in an unprovoked attack.
I spotted another crusader seriously debating whether the Israeli army was still a "moral army". I read that one twice.

I'm glad that he likes to reread things but he doesn't need to keep telling us. Of course Israel can't hpe to match Hezbullah's high moral standards but it is something to aim at.
In Vietnam long ago, in explaining why "we will win", a member of the National Liberation Front told me, "They (the Americans) can't kill us all." The invaders (the word was almost never used in the West) did their best and killed or caused the death of up to three million people.

It's funny how there were no boat people fleeing Vietnam whilst Amerikkka was there but as soon as Bilger's mates took over there was an exodus.
The paradox is that resistance to rapacious power, to epic crimes of invasion (which the Nuremberg judges called the "paramount" crime) is humanity at its noblest; yet no resistance is pretty.

Nuremberg, another Nazi comparison by Pilger, you see everyone is a nazi- Israel, USA, Britain, in fact everyone except the organisation which explicitly wishes to kill all jews world wide*. Again Pilger ignores the fact that it was Hezbollah who violated Israeli territory to murder and abduct Israels soldiers, and Hezbollah who could end this by simply returning the two soldiers.
those faceless, despised Iraqis who have succeeded in pinning down the American homicidal machine in their country.

So they are supposed to be a resistance yet Pilger is praising them for keeping the invaders in their country? Is this man even capable of keeping his bullshit internally consitant?
Now, in Lebanon, after all these years of terrorising an occupied people,
Er no, after six years not occupying an inch of Lebanese territory. If the facts don't support your case Pilger just invents new ones, no wonder he is such a revered campaigning journalist.

*If they (Jews) all gather in Israel, it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide.
--Hassan Nasrallah, the Lebanon Daily Star, October 2002

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