Just as apartheid South Africa claimed to be a parliamentary democracy (albeit for whites only), so apartheid Israel incessantly boasts that it is the “only democracy in the Middle East” (albeit for Jews only).
The reality is that Israel is a militarist and gangster dictatorship that masquerades as a democracy, “national security” being the secrecy criterion that blankets everything from murder to corruption.
Zionist Hasbara propagandists Rodney Mazinter and Allan Wolman yesterday told your readers that Israel uses weapons to protect itself from terrorists and, without a shred of substantiation, that I have an “inbred hatred of the Jewish state”.
Mazinter declares Israel “tries its utmost to prevent civilian casualties, targets with great military precision only terrorists and their bases”.
The reality is that civilian casualties (including children) of recurring Israeli bombardments of Gaza are deliberate and disproportionate, and constitute war crimes under international law.
Israel exports weapons to 130 countries and blatantly markets them as “battle-tested and proven on Palestinians”. The Israeli arms industry is consequently a menace not only to Palestinians, but to the entire international community.
As illustrated in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Israeli weapons keep dictators in office against the plunder of natural resources required by the “First World’s war business”. An estimated 10 million people have died in the DRC since 1997 when Israeli diamond dealer Dan Gertler persuaded an Israeli bank to fund Lawrence Kabila’s war against Joseph Mobutu.
Nor should we forget that the Israeli-designed G3 semi-automatic rifles used by the SAPS in 2012 to murder 34 miners at Marikana were manufactured by Denel under licence from Israel. The Brazilian death-squad police that terrorise the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are trained by Israelis - as are many of most notoriously violent and racist American police forces.
Numerous countries in the Middle East, including Libya and Syria, have been systematically destroyed because of blatantly false Israeli allegations
and propaganda.
Wolman cites Syria as an example of Israeli humanity. The reality is that Israel has been deliberately destabilising Syria, including funding and equipping the Islamic State and other anti-government terrorists.
The world teeters on the brink of an Israeli-motivated war against Iran, a country which, unlike Israel, abandoned ambitions to develop nuclear weapons as long ago as 2003.
Why do the US and EU governments hypocritically close their eyes to Israel’s estimated 200 nuclear warheads, and deliberately impoverish the Iranian people with blockades that are in violation of international law?
Can there any more repugnant dictatorship in the entire world than Israel’s secret ally Saudi Arabia? Israel supplies the cyber-warfare equipment to monitor Saudi dissidents, and is accordingly complicit when they are murdered and/or “disappeared.” The barbaric death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi is just one example.
In his book War Against The People, Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper opens with a question:
“How does Israel get away with it? In a decidedly post-colonial age, how is Israel able to sustain a half-century occupation over the Palestinians, a people it violently displaced in 1948, in the face of almost unanimous international opposition?
"Why, indeed, does the international community tolerate an unnecessary conflict that not only obstructs efforts to bring some stability to the wider Middle East, a pretty important geopolitical region in which the US and Europe are fighting a number of wars, but one that severely disrupts the international system as
a whole?”
Halper’s thesis is that Zionist Israel does “the dirty work” for the US war business and, as reward, is protected at the UN Security Council. It was deliberate and false Israeli misinformation (even before the attack on the New York World Trade Centre in 2001) that Iraq held weapons of mass destruction which instigated the two-decades-long era of “perpetual warfare”.
Yet, as the US loses yet another war in Afghanistan, long famous as the graveyard of empires, that era is fast collapsing. Among the consequences, the prospects include de-dollarisation of the world economy and financial collapse which will eclipse the 1930s depression but also - Inshallah, God-willing - an end to the use of war to resolve conflicts.
Such realities expose Mazinter and Wolman’s venom, smears and lies in promoting Israel as a bastion of democracy and freedom.
They were again highlighted this past weekend when right-wing Zionist thugs and the Israeli police desecrated Al Aqsa mosque in conduct reminiscent of Nazi desecration of synagogues in Germany during the 1930s.
Why the “crime of silence” from the SA Jewish Board of Deputies and other representatives of the South African Jewish community?
* Terry Crawford-Browne.
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