By Lasantha Pethiyagoda –

Prof (Emeritus) Lasantha Pethiyagoda

If you depend on mainstream western media to learn about world events, the above will have been drilled into your mind over the past year or so.

The attempted breakout from the concentration camp (a reference to Gaza by several internationally recognized personalities over a long time) on 7th Oct 2023 has been widely promoted as an unprovoked act of “genocide” by the resistance groups who had been refugees for generations.

I would like to acknowledge material from the many interviews and presentations by world renown academics such as John Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs, Norman Finkelstein, M. Marandi, Ilan Pappe’, Vijay Prasad (with Noam Chomsky), military analysts such as Scott Ritter, Douglas Macgregor and others which have greatly influenced my views.

There are several things that should be obvious. The huge walls criss-crossing the territories in the West Bank and the great wall separating Gaza from present-day Israel, different rules for Palestinians and Jews by Israeli authorities, the consistent denial of human rights, civilians who have now become prisoners in these apartheid sections having been put on starvation diets for decades as official government policy and subjected to hours-long delays to travel just a kilometre or two to see relatives or do shopping, with constant humiliation, electronic surveillance, deliberate denial of access to hospitals in emergencies and many more travesties have been “normal” for decades upon decades.

The above are crimes against humanity, conducted blatantly with cover from mainly just one power at the UN, the United States which vetoed every resolution against Israel for many years. The slow ethnic cleansing was endemic. Regular carpet bombing of neighbourhoods in retaliation for kids throwing stones occurred every few years. It was referred to as “mowing the grass” which means cutting down any resistance, to acceptable levels every so often.

In the meantime, Israel continued to bomb targets in neighbouring countries. These countries are considered largely Israeli property as promised to them from Abraham’s time. Targets included airports, embassies, technology sites, energy installations etc although officially they were not at war with these “entities”. Some neighbouring country leaders took the easier option of accepting US bribes and signed agreements with Israel, although they too were occasionally bombed despite the submissive status. As these countries were undemocratic and ruled by puppets, the region naturally developed fanaticism and extremism due to pent-up frustration.

The US meanwhile, bombed back to the Stone Age, any country in the region which dared to either divest from the US dollar or even remotely resisted the expansionist agenda of Greater Israel. US contractors and large corporations would then undertake reconstruction projects, thus earning great profits from the wars their government facilitated.

Wars were great sources of income for the purveyors of mass murder of lesser people as they manufactured much of the armaments required for weapons of mass destruction. They are collectively referred to as the Military-Industrial-Complex. On the other hand, the USD is the world’s reserve currency. So, it just prints money to pay its bills and gives Israel any amount it asks, usually in the billions of dollars each time.

The mainstream media is part of the above cabal of manipulators who seemed to believe that the planet was theirs to control as they pleased. So, it faithfully omits facts and truth from its vast media empires straddling the planet, much like the hundreds of US military bases that threaten and subjugate the countries they are based in.

Israel, meanwhile “defends itself” by constantly expanding its territory either via regional wars or by expelling indigenous people who lived in these areas for thousands of years. On 7th Oct 2023, the Palestinian resistance, at great sacrifice to their people, knowing the brutal barbarity of the oppressor’s response, dared to launch an “offensive” hitherto the privilege of their ethno-supremacist masters.

Subsequent discourse howled with indignation, that a subhuman species of human animal had dared to challenge the status quo. The mainstream media was flooded with cries of foul, cries claiming abysmal lies like mass rape and baked babies or beheaded babies that were designed to perpetuate the role of victim that these chosen people had always played since the Nazi holocaust.

Israel is also defending itself when its response to rocket attacks from the north were at a ratio of 4:1. In the first days prior to its latest invasion, it used more than the total tonnage of munitions used on Dresden during the blitzkrieg.

Israel uses collective punishment on any resistance as evident throughout the massacres in Gaza and the West Bank. Lebanon is home to Christians, Druze and Hizballah, of the Shia community is just one of them. However, 2000-pound bombs in residential areas do not discriminate. Exploding pagers and Walkie Talkies and hacked barcodes are all war crimes.

Israel probably plans to annex much of Lebanon, more parts of Syria and Jordan as well as any part of biblical Egypt. Hamas provided the causus belli for the grand project of depopulating Gaza, then making life intolerable in the West Bank and southern Lebanon, so that Palestinians and Arabs are ethnically cleansed to make way for a pure Jewish state to emerge. It looks like Iran may not co-operate, though.