Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

THERE IS little one can write about the daily massacres of the abandoned and helpless Palestinians that the readers have not already seen on their TV screens. Rather than trying to imagine it through words, the harrowing ferocity of the ongoing butchery is best visualised by actual images, delivered daily for all to witness in laser sharp satellite footage.

Hence, I want to talk about another unseen weapon in this uneven war. It is the deliberate manipulation of words and language in the Western media to distort the facts in order to exonerate Israel. While this apparatus of war is not as easily detectable as bombs and bullets, it is equally evil and demented.

For example, early in the current Intifada, Newsweek carried a report in its Nov. 13 issue last year, titled "Beyond Slingshots and Rubber Bullets" which had a chart comparing the actual military capabilities of Israel and the Palestinians. While listing some of the arsenal Israel possessed and unleashed against the Palestinians (warplanes, tanks, etc.), the column for the Palestinian "arsenal" simply stated that "the Oslo accords allowed 30,000 weapons but the Palestinian National Authority has an estimated 40,000 - 45,000".

"Weapons"? Indeed, Edward Said's thesis that American Zionists are far more obsessive than their Israeli counterparts could not have more glaring truth to it. Not even that professional fabricator and outright liar, Dori Gold, could have used such a generic term in the context of comparing and quantifying the military strength of the two sides. The next thing I expected to read was that Israel "confiscated fifty land", or that it "cut off a hundred water". Not too far fetched from the same debased propagandists.

The game of words keeps getting uglier. Recently, when deputy Israeli Police Minister Gideon Esra, on the pages of Yediot Aharonot, called for Palestinian suicide bombers to be buried with pig skin or pig blood, CNN did not even pretend to conceal any outrage and simply volunteered to convey the bizarre fabrication that "according to Muslim belief, being buried in pig skin or blood could make the body ineligible for martyr status", and therefore such practice, CNN narrated, "could deter potential attackers". So, we learn, there is a useful deterrence after all from the prehistoric and barbaric ritual of mutilating dead bodies.

The above is only a small example of the journalistic debauchery littering the American media in particular and the Western media in general when reporting the Israeli massacres of Palestinians. Of course, it is impossible to catalogue all the lies - many activists have been tirelessly monitoring and exposing the travesty - but it would be accurate to say that for each Israeli bullet or missile fired during this Intifada, there was a written or spoken twin attack in the media.

The same kind of people who could not care to explain whether "weapons" referred to meagre pistols and rifles (currently in the hands of the Palestinians) or to nuclear warheads, are still waging a parallel war against the Palestinians by murdering the truth or deforming it beyond recognition.

These are the same organisations that have been reporting the televised Israeli practice-shooting of Palestinian schoolchildren simply as "violent incidents". These are the same news outlets describing Israeli targeted bombings of civilian homes by stating that "some buildings were damaged during the clashes". When a Palestinian family is wiped out in their home by tank fire, there are always "conflicting reports" about how they were killed. When passengers are blown up in their car by a helicopter gunship, they are instantly described as "potential terrorists on their way to plant a bomb". When Palestinian infants are torn by Israeli bullets and shells, "crossfire" is most likely to have caused their deaths.

But when the victims are Israeli, there is none of that. You suddenly start learning the names of the victims, that they had a loving mother and a father, that they had a bright future ahead of them, that they even had a beautiful smile, extinguished by cruel, barbaric creatures. None of this of course applies to our children who, the Zionists claim, get sent by their parents to die as a media ploy.

In the frenzy of this dual-frontier war, we must pause to address the real causes of this immoral, almost criminal, falsification of facts by people who otherwise seem to be normal, law-abiding citizens and professionals.

We have to face the fact that underlying this media war, as with the roots of the original Israeli military aggression, there lurks a very potent disease; a severe sickness of the mind that needs specialists to cure, if it can ever be cured. This disease is the subject of the major UN conference next month in Durban, South Africa. This affliction is racism.

The most pernicious manifestation of this venom is the blatant racism imbedded deep within the Zionist psyche, the racism that arrogantly refuses to admit or relate to the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people when the colonial Zionists arrived and forcibly stole - yes stole - their land in 1948, the land they inhabited for thousands of years. This is the same poisoned ideology upon which entire generations of Israelis were brought up, totally oblivious to the five million human beings who have been paying the heavy price of their obnoxious Zionist dream for the last 53 years.

This racism - the basic belief that Jewish life is more valuable than Arab life coupled with the zealous insistence that fulfilling an incongruous biblical prophecy is a justification for ethnic cleansing and war crimes - is the only explanation of how the murders of hundreds of Palestinians in the Intifada can be turned into mere statistics, while the taking of an Israeli life prompts immediate reflection, anguish and endless grieving and questioning of the humanity of the other side. It is all about racism.

What else can explain the intellectual fervour driving an incessant disinformationist like Lee Hockstader to devote a full report in the Washington Post (Aug. 19) to quote an interview with a father of a victim of the Jerusalem pizzeria bombing? Of course all civilian deaths are tragic and deplorable, but would this reporter ever consider publishing one word from an agonising Palestinian mother whose child was ripped apart, not by a lone bomber, but by direct Israeli military orders? Would he ever contemplate doing that, just for the sake of perceived, if not real, impartiality?

Of course not, and you can understand why from the excerpts he chose from this interview. The words of the grieving Israeli father that were music to Hockstader's ears were the assertion that the "profound hatred" Israelis encounter from Palestinians (referred to throughout the interview only as "barbarians") was "baseless ... imponderable hatred", a kind of hatred that "doesn't really have any basis to it."

This is the message that these deranged Zionists in the Western media want to disseminate to the rest of the world. That there is no occupation, there is no dehumanisation, there is no collective punishment, there are no arbitrary home demolitions, illegal detentions, humiliating road blocks, land confiscation, uprooting of trees, torture inside awful prison camps, sanctioned assassinations, blockades of food and urgent medical assistance, and indiscriminate bombings of civilian homes. None of these crimes exist. What drives the Palestinians to kill themselves, we are told, is pure inexplicable anti-Semitic hatred that has no basis or background.

Basically, people like Hockstader, who know too well that their ideology is built upon a racist premise, are in constant need for a justification for this racism - the justification being that Palestinians are an irrational murderous species - so that they can continue to keep a facade of humanism while looking upon the Palestinian people as a group of untamed beasts that need to be put down by force.

And brutal force is what they are advocating. A despicable character in the name of Michael Kelly called upon Israel in the Washington Post (Aug. 15) to "unleash an overwhelming force" against the Palestinians, to "go right ahead and escalate the violence" and to "destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces."

Two equally astonishing pleas for Palestinian blood to be spilled were voiced by Charles Krauthammer (Aug. 16) and George Will (Aug. 17 in the same newspaper.

If anyone dared incite the Apartheid regime to do the same against the ANC in South Africa some years ago, this person would immediately have been castigated as a mad racist, if not arrested and charged. But the Palestinians have already been dehumanised and demoted down to a breed of unreasonable, homicidal, violent beings by the Zionist instigators, and that is why such bigotry goes unchecked.

On this note, the delegates meeting in South Africa next month should put up a fight and recall the well known fact that when the Apartheid regime was squeezed and isolated by the entire world, Israel was its only lifeline and ever faithful ally. Maybe it would be an occasion for the world to remember that the state of alleged Holocaust survivors was the only country having a full scale political, economic, military and scientific cooperation with that abhorrent neo-Nazi regime throughout its long reign, and was the country directly responsible for prolonging the life of Apartheid being its only breathing outlet (the long-term arms supply contracts between Israel and the Apartheid regime were even the subject of a UN resolution in 1987 calling upon Israel to desist from its scandalous partnership with this racist regime).

Perhaps, if the issue of Zionist racism is explored in an objective and scientific manner - and it cannot be more timely than during the upcoming Durban conference - then maybe the present shameless onslaught by the anti-Palestinian media can be exposed and confined to its narrow-minded perspective; that of raving xenophobia, rampant bigotry and disguised Jewish supremacy.