The Bottomless Dishonesty of CNN on Palestine and Marc Lamont Hill Firing
By Juan Cole, Informed Comment
03 December 18
CNN has fired contributor Marc Lamont Hill for a speech he gave on
Palestinian rights at the UN. The speech can be found here.
You can protest this outrageous firing at this petition site.
And here is a link to his book, Nobody: Casualties of America's War on the
Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond, which everyone should buy and
read.
CNN would have been under special pressure to fire Hill because he is a
prominent African-American intellectual with a following in his own
community, and the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs (the propaganda arm
of the Likud government) is worried about the boycott and sanctions movement
spreading among American minorities who might sympathize with the oppressed
Palestinians.
In his speech, Hill carefully explained all the ways in which Israeli
Apartheid practices (my word, not his) devastate the basic human rights of
the 5 million Palestinians living under Occupation. Not only are the 20
percent of Israeli citizens who are of Palestinian heritage second class
citizens (and, increasingly, third class citizens), but those kept under the
jackboot of the Israeli military in the Palestinian West Bank and in Gaza
are kept stateless and without even the right to have rights.
These crimes, epochal and unparalleled in our own time, are being committed
by Binyamin Netanyahu and his henchmen in plain sight, violating every
principle of agreed-upon international law in the post-1945 period. (I say
unparalleled because I know of no other government on earth in the 21st
century deliberately keeping millions of persons stateless and depriving
them of citizenship. Some countries give minorities a citizenship many of
the latter do not want, but they still do have a passport and property
rights). Israel occupied the Palestinian West Bank and the Gaza Strip in
1967 and refuses to relinquish them or grant citizenship to the inhabitants,
ensuring they remain in the twilight zone of statelessness. They are by far
the largest stateless population in the world, (Undocumented migrants are
not stateless since they have citizenship in their home country). The Nazis
made Jews stateless as a prelude to the Holocaust.
One way that the Israeli right wing gets away with these atrocities is to
use techniques of blackballing, smearing, and propaganda to marginalize any
voices they don't like. Jewish American mainstream organizations like the
Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco secretly have created web sites
and techniques for getting people fired or blocking their career advancement
if they aren't on board with Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West
Bank. Canary Mission is even now targeting our undergraduate students,
hoping to blight their lives for taking a stand for justice. I do not
believe it is too much to say that Canary Mission is evil.
Pro-Israel bigots in the United States who freely speak about Arabs as
"animals" or speak of "filthy Arabs" suddenly develop a saintly halo and
accuse anyone who points to Netanyahu's systematic dispossession of the
Palestinians of being an anti-Semite. And they've been remarkably successful
in marginalizing anyone who takes them on. They connive at unelecting
congressmen and -women, they block appointments to the Federal government,
and organize massive letter-writing campaigns to news outlets to pressure
them into firing and blackballing journalists or changing the way they speak
about Israeli colonizing activities. (The organization "CAMERA" targets
journalists in particular).
This success is not because "Jews" are "powerful." First of all, only a
minority of Jewish Americans sympathize with the far right politics of the
Likud Party. Jon Stewart used to complain tongue in cheek that if Jews were
so powerful he ought to have been able to get off basic cable and have a
network show.
The success is because right wing white people are so powerful, and many of
them still have a latent belief in the goodness of colonialism and in the
White Man's Burden. Melanie McAlister argued brilliantly that for right
wing Christian whites in the United States, the Israeli domination of the
Palestinians is a symbolic reenactment of the Vietnam War, in which this
time the "white people" (as they characterize themselves) win instead of
losing. I.e., Israel functions as did those old Rambo movies. I was shocked
to discover that my opposition to Bush's Iraq War and critique of it as
neo-colonialism was offensive to the Northeast power elite because they
supported the war and apparently couldn't deal with their unfaced assumption
of racial superiority over Iraqis.
On the other side, a Christian Zionist such as Rick Santorum is paid to go
on CNN and say things like, "If they want to negotiate with Israelis, and
all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they're not
Palestinians. There is no 'Palestinian.' This is Israeli land."
That is all right in White America, but substitute Palestinians for Israelis
and vice versa in Santorum's vile quote and imagine what would happen to
someone who said *that* on t.v.
Hill was raked over the coals by the bigoted and racist Israel lobbies for
saying this:
"we have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit
to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international
action that will give us what justice requires. And that is a free Palestine
from the river to the sea."
You will notice that Palestine, i.e. the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza (the
Green parts), stretches from the river to the sea:
It is interrupted by Israeli territory in between, of course.
Dishonest propagandists accused Hill of using the language of Hamas, which
rejects Israel and has said, "Palestine is ours, from the river to the sea
and from the south to the north." But you'll note that Hill did not say
anything about north to south.
Hill admittedly does not think a two-state solution is any longer plausible.
But what he was calling for was for the people living in the Occupied
territories to be full citizens, and to have these citizenship rights
pertain to everyone living between the river and the sea. He did not say
anything about Israelis not having equal rights.
It is not a firing offense to ask for Palestinians living between the river
and the sea to enjoy the full rights of citizenship. In fact, Yitzhak Rabin
and Shimon Peres pledged exactly that. Rabin shook Yasser Arafat's and Bill
Clinton's hand over it on the White House lawn. Rabin was later assassinated
by the sort of person now howling for Hill's blood. Rabin's vision of a
Palestinian state and a two-state solution may well be impossible. That
outcome has been engineered by Netanyahu and his thugs. But whatever the
diplomacy, it cannot be allowed to keep Palestinians stateless and virtually
without secure rights forever.
Hill was also slammed for urging Palestinian activism to oppose the
Occupation. One of the standard Israeli propaganda techniques is to equate
any resistance to their frankly fascist techniques of social control imposed
on the colonized Palestinians with "terrorism." There is nothing new or
strange about this. The British in India considered Gandhi a terrorist. Of
course the colonial state views opposition as terrorism.
That same dishonest columnist at The Forward managed to reconfigure Hill's
activism as violence. The fact is that international law recognizes the
right of occupied peoples to mount even violent resistance to occupation
militaries. But that isn't what Hill was calling for. And then, any violence
is then twisted around as violence toward civilians. And there you have it.
Terrorism.
The golden magic circle of Hasbara (Zionist propaganda) gives us:
resistance= violence= terrorism.
The only thing the Palestinians and their sympathizers can do to make
Zionists happy is to bend over and allow themselves to be royally screwed-
or better yet, allow themselves to be deported from their homeland of
millennia at the hands of the Russian and Polish immigrants.
The Likudniks don't actually want nonviolent resistance. That prospect
horrifies them since they can't do a magic circle number on it. When Mubarak
Awad tried to start a center for Palestinian nonviolent resistance on the
West Bank, the Israeli government illegally expelled him from his own home.
One of the reasons the Israeli army is just shooting down unarmed
Palestinians in cold blood inside Gaza is that they want to create the image
of a violent confrontation where there is none (the marches have not
involved clashes with the Israeli army).
CNN does a criminally negligent job of covering Palestine, giving us little
better than Israeli propaganda. For the most part, it shapes the
presentation of the story by simply ignoring it. But it also shapes the
story with a systematically biased language intended to demonize the
Palestinians and exonerate Israeli crimes against humanity.
Last March when Palestinians imprisoned in the open air concentration camp
of Gaza by the Israeli army, navy and air force- and blockaded from key
commodities- began marching to draw attention to their imprisonment, the
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his officer corps decided to
deal with these protests by shooting down unarmed protesters, many of them
women and children, with live fire, on the Gaza side of the border. Using
live ammunition on protesters is a war crime. All the civilized countries in
the world should have withdrawn their ambassadors and slapped severe
economic sanctions on the Netanyahu regime in response.
CNN's reporting on one of the first such Israeli crimes? "Gaza: 17
Palestinians killed in confrontations with Israeli forces - CNN". That makes
it sound as though the dead Palestinians had come over to the Israeli side
of the border and attacked Israeli "forces" (Israel has an army, let us call
it an army). But there is a problem with this framing. Those shot down were
on the Gaza side of the border and there has been no direct physical
encounter with Israeli troops. The dozens of Palestinians shot down in cold
blood and the hundreds shot and injured in these demonstrations since March
have largely gone unreported at CNN. Otherwise there'd be a segment every
Friday afternoon.
In the first six months of the ongoing weekly rallies, Mezan reported that
"150 Palestinians have been killed in the demonstrations. At least 10,000
others have been injured, including 1,849 children, 424 women, 115
paramedics and 115 journalists. Of those injured, 5,814 were hit by live
ammunition."
Amnesty International notes that many of the injuries inflicted on the
protesters are to lower limbs and that:
"According to military experts as well as a forensic pathologist who
reviewed photographs of injuries obtained by Amnesty International, many of
the wounds observed by doctors in Gaza are consistent with those caused by
high-velocity Israeli-manufactured Tavor rifles using 5.56mm military
ammunition. Other wounds bear the hallmarks of US-manufactured M24 Remington
sniper rifles shooting 7.62mm hunting ammunition, which expand and mushroom
inside the body.
The nature of these injuries shows that Israeli soldiers are using
high-velocity military weapons designed to cause maximum harm to Palestinian
protesters who do not pose an imminent threat to them. These apparently
deliberate attempts to kill and maim are deeply disturbing, not to mention
completely illegal. Some of these cases appear to amount to wilful killing,
a grave breach of the Geneva Conventions and a war crime."
Again, the weekly carnage committed by the Israeli army in direct violation
of the Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of Occupied populations
and in direct violation of the 2002 Rome Statute that created the
International Court of Justice, is not covered by CNN. If you got your news
from that source, you would not know anything is going on in Gaza.
Nor does CNN cover the tripling of Israeli squatter colonies on Palestinian
land in the Palestinian West Bank during the Trump administration, nor the
daily acts of violence, sabotage and usurpation committed by Israelis
squatting on Palestinian land against Palestinians in their own homes.
This United Nations set of reports is what the real news from the Occupied
Territories looks like.
If Netanyahu could shut the UN up, he would. His minions have shut up Marc
Lamont Hill, a brave voice for freedom and human rights in our time who will
now be replaced by the Rick Santorums.
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