Why Israel Lies by CHRIS Hedges on truthdig

Click for Chris Hedges article on truthdig

All governments lie, But Israel engages in the kinds of jaw-dropping lies that characterize despotic and totalitarian regimes. It does not deform the truth; it inverts it….diametrically opposed to reality….Israel’s Alice-in-Wonderland narratives…we know they are untrue.

Hedges: “I saw small (10 year old) boys baited and killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza refugee camp of Khan Younis.”

Hedges: “I was present more than once as Israeli troops drew out and shot Palestinian children in this way. Such incidents, in the Israeli lexicon, become children caught in crossfire.”

Hedges: “I was in Gaza when F-16 attack jets dropped 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs on overcrowded hovels in Gaza City.”

Hedges: “I saw the corpses of the victims, including children.”

Hedges: “I have watched Israel demolish homes and entire apartment blocks…”

Hedges: “I have stood in the remains of (2 UN) schools” —Israel struck killing 29.

Hedges: “I have heard Israel claim that errant rockets or mortar fire from the Palestinians caused these and other deaths.”

Hedges: “I have heard Israel claim…that the attacked spots were being used as arms depots or launching sites.”

Hedges: “I, along with every other reporter I know who has worked in Gaza, have never seen any evidence that Hamas uses civilians as ‘human shields.'”

Hedges: “I have interviewed the destitute and homeless families, some camped out in crude shelters erected in the rubble.”

“Anyone who has proclaimed VIOLENCE his method inexorably must choose LYlNG as his principle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Hedges: “There is a perverted logic to Israel’s repeated use of the Big Lie—Große Lüge—the lie favored by tyrants from Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The Big Lie feeds the two reactions Israel seeks to elicit—racism among its supporters and terror among its victims.”

Hedges: ISRAEL “By painting a picture of an army that never attacks civilians, that indeed goes out of its way to protect them, the Big Lie says Israelis are civilized and humane, and their Palestinian opponents are inhuman monsters.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie serves the idea that the slaughter in Gaza is a clash of civilizations, a war between democracy, decency and honor on one side and Islamic barbarism on the other.”

Hedges: “…when news of (ISRAELI) atrocities penetrates to the wider public, Israel blames the destruction and casualties on Hamas.” ORWELL’S doublethink propaganda = Uses “logic against logic” and “repudiate[s] morality while laying claim to it.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie…is a state-orchestrated response…(of) their own moral superiority at the very moment they have abrogated all morality.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie…is limited only by the propagandist’s capacity to fathom and harness the undercurrents of individual and mass psychology.”

FACT: Most supporters of Israel do not have a desire to know the truth of their own racism and self-delusions of moral superiority.

Hedges = “Like packs of famished dogs they lap up the lies fed to them by the Israeli government.”

The Big Lie = Grows in what Bernays called the “logic-proof compartment of dogmatic adherence” to irrational “psychological habits.”

Hedges: ISRAEL “is the world Franz Kafka envisioned, a world where the irrational becomes rational.”

Hedges: “Courage to speak the truth—Uri Avnery, Max Blumenthal, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Norman Finkelstein, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy, Ilan Pappé, Henry Siegman and Philip Weiss” = “So many of these voices are Jewish, and therefore have more credibility than non-Jews who are among Israel’s cheerleaders, only ratchets up the level of hate.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie is also consciously designed to send a chilling message to Gaza’s Palestinians, who have lost large numbers of their dwellings, clinics, mosques, and power, water and sewage facilities, along with schools and hospitals, who have suffered some 2,OOO+ deaths since this assault began—most of the victims women and children—and who have seen 500,000 people displaced from their homes.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie makes it clear to the Palestinians that Israel will continue to wage a campaign of state terror and will never admit its atrocities or its intentions.”

FACT: “The vast disparity between what Israel says and what Israel does tells the Palestinians that there is no hope. Israel will do and say whatever it wants. International law, like the truth, will always be irrelevant.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S Defense Forces website = Black propaganda. “Hamas exploits the IDF’s sensitivity towards protecting civilian structures, particularly holy sites, by hiding command centers, weapons caches and tunnel entrances in mosques.”

Hedges: “Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Ron Dermer, in a Big Lie of his own, said last month at a conference of Christians United for Israel that the Israeli army should be given the ‘Nobel Peace Prize … a Nobel Peace Prize for fighting with unimaginable restraint.'”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie destroys any possibility of history and therefore any hope for a dialogue between antagonistic parties that can be grounded in truth and reality.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “the Big Lie ‘want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.'” = “destroyed the dignity of human thought.” + “destroy the dignity of human action.” = The result is that “history itself is destroyed, and its comprehensibility.”

Hedges: TO ISRAEL “facts no longer matter, when there is no shared history grounded in the truth, when people foolishly believe their own lies, there can be no useful exchange of information.”

Hedges: ISRAEL’S “The Big Lie, used like a bludgeon by Israel, as perhaps it is designed to be, ultimately reduces all problems in the world to the brutish language of violence.”

Hedges: “And when oppressed people are addressed only through violence they will answer only through violence.”

TO REPEAT: “Anyone who has proclaimed VIOLENCE his method inexorably must choose LYlNG as his principle.”

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn