Owen Jones opened a fourteen minute podcast yesterday with this:
The fact that almost the entire Western media hasn’t reported on this tells you all you need to know.
He has in mind a story covered by Arab media including The New Arab, two days ago:
The Deputy Speaker of Israel’s parliament (Knesset) called for executing all Palestinian men in Gaza on Sunday, as well as the destruction of Jenin in the occupied West Bank.
Nissim Vaturi, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called for separating the women and children in Gaza and executing the men.
“Who is innocent in Gaza? Civilians went out and slaughtered people in cold blood,” Vaturi told ultra-Orthodox radio station Kol BaRama. “We need to separate the children and women and kill the adults in Gaza, we are being too considerate.”
The Israeli lawmaker said that “no one in the world wants the civilians in Gaza, everyone is pushing them into Israel, they know that these are scum and subhumans”.
Vaturi also called for the widescale destruction of Jenin, which is currently under a brutal Israeli military siege, with tanks being sent into the West Bank city and refugee camp on Monday.
Eight days ago I posted on the IDF unit which strapped explosives to the neck of an 80 year old Gazan then, while holding his wife hostage, deploying him as a human shield before releasing both to be shot dead by a second IDF unit. Noting, pace Owen Jones, Western corporate media silence on that atrocity, I wrote:
Imagine Hamas doing something like this, or Russian forces in Ukraine? Would it not be lead story for every broadcaster, emblazoned across every front page, in the collective West? The hypocrisy and double standards are the least of it. Corporate media lies of omission are, when all is said and done, par for the course. But in their silence on this as on so many other deeds of the Zionist regime and its enablers, are they not themselves a party to war crimes? 1
Writing today, Caitlin Johnstone also refers to Nissim Vaturi’s words:
The deputy speaker for the Israeli Knesset recently said during a radio interview that all adult men in Gaza should be exterminated and called Palestinians “subhumans”, saying “Who is innocent in Gaza?”
It’s almost a cliché to say “Imagine if this was said about Jews” at this point, but seriously: imagine if this was said about Jews. Imagine how hard the earth would shake if a parliamentary leader in your nation said this about Jews in Israel. It’d be the only story in the news.
Later in the same post she writes:
Some Zionist victim-LARPer asked me “Why do you hate Israel?” – as though that would be a barbaric position. I told him I hate Israel because I’m not a fucking psychopath.
Echoes here of Owen Jones, in dialogue last June with an Israeli war crimes apologist:
Hen Mazzig: I do understand why this conflict raises a lot of emotions I think we need to focus on reality and I understand especially when you are Jewish or Palestinian or Arab why you feel so connected to this conflict and really hurt and upset. I’m upset for my family and friends I lost on October 7. I don’t understand why you are upset …
Owen Jones: Because I object to genocide. I’m a human being.
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- The unease of some media employees in the West is not in doubt; a case in point being the letter, with over 100 staff signatories, to the BBC Director General and BBC CEO last year, saying “basic journalistic tenets have been lacking when it comes to holding Israel to account for its actions.” But pressure more concerted and powerful comes from the opposite direction. Witness this story yesterday about – ahem – pro-Palestinian bias at the Beeb! I’m reminded of the admonition, its provenance contested, that if one source says it’s raining while another says it ain’t, the journalist’s job is not to report both in the interests of ‘balance’. It’s to look out of the window and report the truth! Preposterously idealistic to be sure, when the stakes are high for powerful interests, but ideals however tarnished are not to be jettisoned in response to systemic corruption. So let’s shoot for the stars, and substitute genocide/ethnic cleansing for rain.