THE great Palestinian intellectual Edward Said understood what it was to be “the other”. He could write about the idea that the Europeans see all people in the Middle East as simply Arabs. They had no identity in the way that we differentiate Germans, Italians and the English. Only Israelis are given an identity, living among the savage “others” in an inhospitable land.
This is why we in Australia, with the rest of the West, get such a distorted view of the conflict between Palestine and Israel. The latter is a rich nation with a large diaspora that knows how to influence politicians — they are master lobbyists — and use the media.
Propaganda is a tool of Israeli politicians and military figures. The Western media in the main falls for it, afraid of bucking the trend because of the incessant badgering of the Israel lobby and its allies.
How else do we explain the extraordinary and decidedly stupid response of the Australian Government to President Donald Trump’s so called Middle East peace plan, which does nothing more than entrench apartheid where Palestinians are as cruelly treated as black and coloured South Africans were until the early 1990s? That the Australian Government would endorse something that was immediately dismissed by most Western nations and get away with it says much about the bias in our media against Palestinians.
Or put it this way. If an Australian politician overtly supports the rights of Palestinians, he or she is subjected to the harassing shrieks of anti-Semitism and being a supporter of terrorism.
Read the article by Greg Barns in the Mercury.