NARRATIVE: “ISRAEL HAS A RIGHT TO DEFEND ITSELF” USED TO JUSTIFY MURDER AND APARTHEID

— Interview on The Real News Network with Chris Hedges and Linda Sarsour by Jessica Desvarieux

Click for Chris Hedges and Linda Sarsour Interview on The Real News Network

Ceasefires are JOKES! AN END to the SIEGE on Gaza and military occupation in the West Bank MUST be met for genuine negotiations with NO MILITARY PRE-CONDITIONS!

FACT: 50% OF PALESTINIANS ARE UNDER AGE 14!

FACT: The Palestinians represent NO kind of an existential threat to Israel!

FACT: USA = SUPPLIED THE MURDERERS OF ISRAEL WITH WEAPONS!

LINDA SARSOUR: “Every country has the right to defend itself, but it doesn’t justify the killing of over 85% civilians, children, schools, mosques in the region.”

SARSOUR: For Israel and USA to continue to say that Israel has the right to defend itself while you put an entire population under siege in the largest open-air prison is beyond anything that I can personally comprehend. MSM + USA continues to justify what’s happening based on the premise that Israel has a right to defend itself, which then justifies the killing of innocent children, mostly, and women and men and seniors.

Linda Sarsour is a civil rights activist born and raised in Brooklyn, NY and Executive Director of the Arab American Association of NY – Named a 2011 “Champion of Change” by the White House.

Premise = “Israel has a right to defend itself” = Obama + Congress + MSM = AIPAC NEOCON MONEY MOSTLY FROM WALL STREET!

CHRIS HEDGES: Money. That’s how AIPAC works. And they have a lot of money to spend, and they have a large public relations arm to punish people who don’t toe the line. There’s no daylight between the GOP and DEMS on Israel.

CHRIS HEDGES: Bernie Sanders, who wants to run for president, is not going to buck the Israeli lobby = Pathetic that NOT one dissenting voice in Senate on Israel’s PALESTINIAN MURDERS and violation of international law and IDF war crimes. That’s a sad fact.

CHRIS HEDGES: US & ISRAEL have a close intertwining of their military and intelligence establishment. The ordinances being dropped on Gaza are actually manufactured in the USA – “I’ve picked up pieces of shell casings from bombs…dropped on Gaza City, and it says, ‘Manufactured in Dayton, Ohio’”.

CHRIS HEDGES: USA is deeply complicit in the slaughter unleashed by the Israeli military against a defenseless population, a population that has no air force, no navy, no command-and-control, no mechanized units, no heavy artillery, and certainly no air force.

CHRIS HEDGES: UN Charter, Article 51 = Says a group of people that are attacked like this and that appeal to the outside world for help, and when that help is not forthcoming, have a right to defend themselves. The indiscriminate rocket fire on Israel is perhaps a war crime.

CHRIS HEDGES: “But it (Palestinian Rockets) in no way compares to the war crimes that are being carried out against the Palestinian people by the Israeli military, who fatuously talk about defending themselves–this is absurd–and use terms like war, which is also absurd.

CHRIS HEDGES: There’s only one word for what’s happening in Gaza, and that’s called MURDER.

UN + Recently White House condemned Israel’s 7th strike on a UN school used as a shelter = “The United States is appalled by today’s disgraceful shelling outside an UNRWA school in Rafah sheltering some 3,000 displaced persons, in which at least ten more Palestinian civilians were tragically killed.

New Snowden documents show USA is complicity in ISRAELI MURDERS of Palestinians = “Israeli aggression would be impossible without the constant, lavish support and protection of the U.S. government” + NSA + Israeli spy agency is at the center of that enabling.

USA mainstream press are complicit in the slaughter by refusing to challenge the Israeli narrative + MSM uses ISRAELI PROPAGANDISTS like Michael Oren who LIES that Hamas uses human shields. JOHN SNOW, BBC PRESENTER: “I was on the streets of Gaza last week for several days. And I have to say the idea that these people are human shields–you see people being wounded and killed simply because strikes hit the street they’re on. I mean, they are not human shields.”

CHRIS HEDGES: American press has done a particularly poor job…it’s pretty much caved to the Israeli lobby in the same way that our elected officials, including 100 percent of the American Senate, have caved to the Israeli lobby, (including) Bernie Sanders and others.

CHRIS HEDGES: USA MSM hands over such a disproportionate amount of time to Israeli (AIPAC)spokespeople. And if you get a voice in that dissents from the Israeli narrative, it invariably, in terms of time, is cut off. Often people who decent are banished = Rabbi Henry Siegman, the great scholar Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky are real critics of the Israeli policy are never on the airwaves at all.

SARSOUR: Palestinian voices receive almost no airtime versus Israeli voices. And when someone dares to criticize the bias of the media, their interviews get canceled, as we saw recently with Rula Jebreal criticizing her own network, MSNBC. 66 years of MSM BIAS against Arabs and for Israel.

SARSOUR: Social media has played a huge part = Civilians and citizen journalists and surgeons are putting out horrific images from the region and videos of people getting murdered as they’re taping + destruction of neighborhoods = no one in the media can deny what is happening right now in Gaza.

SARSOUR: MSM continues to justify what’s happening based on the premise that Israel has a right to defend itself, which then justifies the killing of innocent children, mostly, and women and men and seniors.

, but at the same time the general public, I mean, the outcry across the world has been really pro-Palestinian. And I think people can’t deny what’s happening in Gaza. And social media has been a very important tool to tell our story.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN: You (USA) are providing the weapons and artillery that allow these attacks to continue. Does that complicate a message of humanity coming from the United States?

JEN PSAKI, US STATE DEPARTMENT: “…it’s no secret …USA and Israel have a strong security relationship…includes providing them with equipment and supplies when it’s needed….We also do an enormous amount of funding for the Iron Dome. We worked with their military.

CHRIS HEDGES: CONGRESS has soverwhelming supported a neocon right-wing policy by AIPAC which put a lot of money into buying Politicians and intimidating them.

CHRIS HEDGES: Bibi Netanyahu has unequivocally been saying he would never permit a Palestinian state — including in his book, where he says that he will never, ever allowed the Palestinian state. + Avigdor Lieberman and others, are unequivocal in their statements that they will never, ever permit a Palestinian state.

CHRIS HEDGES: Israel keeps expanding settlements with the use of force to creation of ringed ghettos, open-air prisons like Gaza = 8 podlike structures in the West Bank completely surrounded by the Israelis = TOTAL impoverishment like
Africanization so Palestinians must struggle at a subsistence level — done by design.

FACT: Hamas has NO capacity to affect the Israeli state

CHRIS HEDGES: Israeli state is carrying out genocide (not too strong a word) and indiscriminate slaughter of innocents = A Policy of landgrab of 40+% of West Bank land = Creation of apartheid-like system that makes any semblance of a Palestinian state impossible. = Expanded by Israel day by day = East Jerusalem is unrecognizable from 1988 because of Israeli buildings and seizures of land.

CHRIS HEDGES: ISRAEL is crushing the existence of the Palestinian state itself. = THE ISRAELI POLICY never spoken.

DOES Hamas charter say that they want to kill the Jews?

FACT: Hamas will not recognize the SOLELY JEWISH State of Israel that ALLOWS NO Others to be given any RIGHTS and OCCUPIES PALESTINE.

SARSOUR: What I do understand is that Hamas has in their charter that it will not recognize the state of Israel. My understanding is that in 2006 they moved away from that position and in a recent interview that Khaled Mashal, a top leader said “we’ve always been ready to coexist with the Jews; we’re just not ready to coexist with the occupiers.” Israel hides this because they don’t want anyone to know that there could potentially be negotiated peace under a Palestinian unity government — This unity government is when all the chaos erupted in the Middle East and, I mean, in the region.

SARSOUR: I am a pro-Palestinian. I support an end of siege on Gaza and an end to military occupation. Israel has equated all of that their “TERRORIST LABELS”

CHRIS HEDGES: “I don’t think it’s fair to Hamas, or, certainly, to the Palestinians, to talk about this kind of hostile attitude toward the Israeli government while you have the blockade in place, where even the most basic amenities–medical aid, food, and everything else–is denied intentionally to the Palestinian people so that all of their energy goes into the struggle to survive itself. And that’s an Israeli policy. I mean, there’s very little difference between life in Gaza and life in the ghettos that were set up by the Nazi regimes initially in Europe…The existence, the horror, the overcrowding, the fact that people can’t leave, can’t work, have struggles just getting clean water, what they have done, this collective punishment on 1.8 million people, is one of the most egregious war crimes on the planet. And to somehow expect the Palestinian people to lie down and speak civilly to a government that is carrying out this horror–and let’s remember that most of the residents in Gaza are children–I think it’s just not fair. I don’t think it’s fair to the Palestinians…”

ROOT CAUSES OF THIS CONFLICT = Ignored by MSM

The Arab world has offered Israel peace if they withdraw to the 1967 borders.

SARSOUR: Root cause of military occupation began with the shift within the Jewish community and I think the media again toes the same line. When we look at the atrocities — the Gazans have nowhere to go in the open-air prison with apartheid walls and checkpoints. Palestinians in this prison become the radicals and terrorists. Israel equates Hamas and Palestinians (50% under age 14) to justify MASS MURDER! But 50% of Palestinians are under age 14 and did not vote for Hamas and I think that is the most ridiculous argument by Israelis. I think that mainstream media needs to start pushing back on these FALSE talking points in the Israeli PR playbook every single Israeli and AIPAC official uses.

CHRIS HEDGES: Go back to 1948: The Israeli Agenda drove 700,000 Palestinians in a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing with the massacre of large numbers of civilians into Gaza, into refugee camps. It has been ramped up under the right-wing Kadima and, previously, Likud governments.

CHRIS HEDGES: Avigdor Lieberman calls for “transfer” or driving Palestinian families into the sea = That this is part of the Israel’s very dark and criminal process to essentially seize the entire land of Palestine = Violating international laws by creating Israeli-type townships of a dwindling and an impoverished and deeply repressed group of Palestinians withering away. = ISRAELI POLICY supported by Netanyahu (recorded candidly confirm this).

CHRIS HEDGES: US GOVERNMENT AND THE PRESS ARE THE PROBLEM. AIPAC MOTIVATES THEM TO POORLY AND FALSELY INFORM AMERICANS who are forced to pay the $BILLIONS IN AID TO ISRAEL.

FACT: $233.3 BILLION SINCE WW II in AID TO ISRAEL or $38,000 per Israeli.

CHRIS HEDGES: PRESS NEVER CONVEYS THE HORROR OF THE MOMENTS IN PALESTINE THAT HAPPEN DAILY OR THE MASS DESTRUCTION AND MURDER! THE PRESS has done a bad job.

CHRIS HEDGES: SO AMERICANS have NO sense of history to make rational judgments about what’s happening. So the Murder and Multi-Level Exploitation of Americans and Palestinians CONTINUES.