John Pilger's Latest Palestine/Israel Power-Peace-Piece ...

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Today we're beginning with an ending.

Below, is the final pair of paragraphs from (multi award winning, international investigative journalist and film maker), John Pilger's latest power-piece published in the UK's New Statesman.

Amira Hass, who has lived in Gaza, describes it as a prison that shames her people. She recalls how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle-train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen on a summer’s day in 1944. "[She] saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking," she wrote. "This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable 'looking from the side'."

"Looking from the side" is what those of us do who are cowed into silence by the threat of being called anti-Semitic. Looking from the side is what too many western Jews do, while those Jews who honour the humane traditions of Judaism and say, "Not in our name!" are abused as "self-despising". Looking from the side is what almost the entire US Congress does, in thrall to or intimidated by a vicious Zionist "lobby".

Looking from the side is what "even-handed" journalists do as they excuse the lawlessness that is the source of Israeli atrocities andsuppresss the historic shifts in the Palestinian resistance, such as the implicit recognition of Israel by Hamas. The people of Gaza cry out for better.

Now, perhaps this is the most appropriate place to point out that just last week we were personally 'attacked' elsewhere online, and were publicly (albeit entirely erroneously), accused of anti-Semitism. Why? Simply because we had the terrible temerity to type the words 'zealot' and 'Zionist' in a single sentence. Quite a cardinal sin, eh? At least it seems to be in some circles.

Still, never mind. It's not the sort of snide (and stupid), sniping that'll ever succeed in stopping us from saying it as we see it.

Next, read the opening paragraphs of the pertinent piece (from which we earlier appended the ending).

In his latest column for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes the warnings of genocide in Gaza, and the suffering of 1.4 million Palestinians living a "life in a cage" as the world looks on. He quotes Israeli journalist Amira Hass on the experience of her mother in a Nazi concentration camp and the Germans who watched, "looking from the side".

A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders. "Some 1.4 million people, mostly children, are piled up in one of the most densely populated regions of the world, with no freedom of movement, no place to run and no space to hide," wrote the senior UN relief official, Jan Egeland, and Jan Eliasson, then Swedish foreign minister, in Le Figaro. They described people "living in a cage", cut off by land, sea and air, with no reliable power and little water and tortured by hunger and disease and incessant attacks by Israeli troops and planes.

Clearer now why we wanted the paragraphs read in reverse order?

We hope so, since it should certainly save us all some extra time and trouble.

And because we wouldn't even pretend to be able to put any words together better than Pilger can, we strongly suggest you read the rest of his article for yourself.

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