source: YouTube
In every war that I've written about, starting with the Great War, it has always been a great challenge to get the armed forces to kill people. Sure, in modern times this is made a lot easier by dropping bombs from great heights, controlling a drone from a lazy chair, or sending a missile on its way by pressing a button. But to come face-to-face with another human being, and then ending their life takes a special kind of mental state. To create that mental state, political and military leaders are on the frontline of the psychological and information warfare that precedes every armed conflict between nations or groups; they spread lies about the "others", they make them less than human, and they demonize them.
In the Great War, there were many reports of soldiers, on all sides, who couldn't bring themselves to shoot, stab, or otherwise kill the living, breathing, and often hysterically shouting and crying enemy. We've become better at it: in both World Wars many soldiers used, or were given drugs to suppress fear and increase "combat readiness". But the "best" improvement, by far, is the use of propaganda to dehumanize the enemy and to create support for the war among the people who stay at home. A very egregious example of this was the fabrication, in 1990, of the "baby incubator" story to incite anger among US citizens, which eventually led to the aggravation of the first Gulf War.
"While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the babies on the cold floor to die," a tearful 15-year-old girl who claimed to be a Kuwaiti volunteer testified against Iraqi soldiers before a US congressional hearing.
source: People's Daily Online
Two years later, that 15-year-old Kuwaiti volunteer turned out to be Nayirah Al-Sabah, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. It was also revealed that her testimony was a carefully prepared script by the American public relations firm Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti Government. The second war against Iraq was part of the "war against terrorism" after the 9/11 attacks. Since almost all the hijackers of the planes used in those attacks were from Saudi Arabia, blatant lies were needed to support wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, which had nothing to do with those attacks. It was widely propagandized that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), which was in itself a weapon of mass deception to excuse the illegal war.
Those are just two prominent examples of the blatant lies that are needed to get people to voluntarily risk the lives of their sons and daughters in a war, but lies are always needed. However, this latest clash between Israel and the Palestinians takes the cake; the number of lies and the amount of disinformation is staggering. Yes, DISinformation, not misinformation; the latter implies that "mistakes were made", the former is the intentional spreading of lies and exaggerations, as well as the withholding of information needed to understand the nature of the conflict or the motivations behind the parties' actions.
In the video linked below this post, an IDF spokesperson brags about the Hamas-to-civilian kill ratio; he suggests that for every Hamas soldier only two innocent civilians have been killed so far. He also claims that this is a very good ratio, unique even given the type of warfare between soldiers and terrorists who hide behind innocent civilians. This is wrong and a blatant lie. According to Israel's assessments, some 30 percent of the Israelis killed on October 7 were military personnel. That's almost the same ratio this IDF spokesperson brags about! Not only that; a number of the dead Israelis are likely to have been killed by friendly fire. Furthermore, the civilian death rate in Gaza will surely rise as a result of the humanitarian crisis they are in right now.
This "operation" in Gaza is a slaughter, it's an act of enraged revenge, just like the October 7 attacks were. It's truly beyond my comprehension how Israel's military and government can claim the moral high ground here. Or wait... There are some reports, which I find highly plausible, that the October 7 attacks were not intended as the wanton killing of innocent civilians. Instead, the goal was to take as many as possible alive hostages, to trade them for the thousands of innocent Palestinians imprisoned by Israeli police and military. And maybe also to get the attention of the world to pressure the Israeli government into negotiations for a real and just solution for the Palestinian people who have lived in an open-air prison for nearly 20 years in Gaza, and under a military occupation in the West Bank.
The brutal retaliation by Israel after October 7 can not be justified or rationalized, other than painting the Palestinians as animals, beasts, and demons. On day one the disinformation was spread about 40 murdered babies in different iterations: some reports spoke of beheaded babies, others about burned babies, and some painted pictures of dead babies hung on clotheslines. We've already seen the rage that can be conjured up by the imagination when innocent babies are killed in such brutal manners. Right after the "humanitarian pause" ended, a new wave of propaganda was started to justify the bombing of south Gaza, the place Gazans were told to go, internally displacing half of the population of 2.3 million. This time it's about the "widespread rape" of Israeli women by the terrorists. As before, the world's mainstream press jumped on this report from Israeli sources. What's usually not mentioned though, is that Israel refuses investigation of those claims by third parties, like Human Rights Watch and the UN. When they're asked for proof of these allegations, they play the antisemitism card.
In the meantime, we know that Palestinian babies have been left to die in their incubators to the point that their bodies have decomposed and have been partially eaten by stray animals. Read this article: "Abandoned babies found decomposing in Gaza hospital weeks after it was evacuated". We know this because there's footage of this horrible sight. I don't know where this ends, but I'm very pessimistic. I fear that Israel will once again get away with their politics of ethnic cleansing. Chances are that Egypt will be forced to, or seduced into opening its borders to take in the Palestinians, thereby solving Israel's "Palestinian problem". Also, the politics of increased settlements and land grabs in the West Bank will continue, destroying many more Palestinian lives... There is some hope though, as many people around the world are waking up to Israel's ethno-nationalist ideology and apartheid politics, Muslims, Jews, Christians, and atheists alike. Let's hope their political leaders will listen to their cries for justice sooner rather than later...
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