Palestine Think Tank

WRITTEN BY IBRAHIM TURNER*
Today in the Parliamentary Question Time Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister answered questions about the Myanmar crisis caused by the cyclone that hit the country over a week ago. Among the measures he called for was an emergency meeting of the United Nations to call on the Military Junta of Myanmar to allow aid workers into the country, to deliver food, water, medicines and other aid to people dispossessed and hungry in the areas affected. Stories appearing in the press and on TV showing bloated dead bodies floating in the rivers and on the banks are all over the media.

Now I am not an admirer of the Junta, in fact I know relatively little about the country and how it is run, except perhaps the terribly thin opposition woman under house arrest for many years, whose picture appears from time to time, without any real depth information about the situation and the image is Junta bad – opposition good.

I find myself in the same situation that occurred when I was living in Istanbul in 2001 and met a Palestinian family, who were trying to get to the West. He said the Israelis had targeted him as a ‘terrorist’ so he had to leave. At that time I knew nothing about the Israeli Palestinian question and was shocked to see the hatred in his eyes, whenever he spoke about ‘them’.  My point is that knowledge, other than what the newspapers and TV want to report on, is the common situation of most people who rely on the media for news.

So I know nothing of the politics of the Junta in Myanmar, but I suspect that the entire hullabaloo about them indicates a hidden agenda – namely regime change.

Tell me a country – a regime, that appears in the news in a bad light in the western press, that somehow that regime is either sitting on some resource or other, or is in a strategic place in the world that reflects the western ‘full spectrum dominance’ agenda of international Likudniks.

So, my point is this, why is Myanmar, such a bad regime and oppressing its people, rightly condemned by everyone, and other regimes do not get this condemnation? What about the pictures of pickup trucks with ‘soldiers’ waving guns about riding through poor towns and villages in whatever country in Africa, not condemned by the ‘international community’? What an oxymoron, international community. It is neither a community nor is it international, it is western double speak, George Orwell would be proud.

So we get foreign correspondents riding boats up the river showing pictures of bloated dead bodies in Myanmar, and we get NGO’s pictures of black refugees having walked miles and miles away from their homes due to fighting and starvation, making their way to camps in the middle of nowhere, trying to stay alive, yet we rarely see the pictures of situation in Mogadishu, any real picture of the situation in Darfur, and absolutely nothing about the situation in the West Bank and Gaza?

There is no natural catastrophe to blame for the deaths and suffering in Gaza. It is entirely manmade, racist and political. When will Gordon Brown call for the United Nations to contemplate forced ‘air drops’ of food and water into Gaza, against the wishes of the Junta controlling the area. He did just that today about Myanmar, except he ruled out dropping water to refugees because it might do more harm than good, hitting people. Water bombs are not allowed, yet depleted uranium shells from artillery and apache gun ships don’t even get a mention.

Therein lies the hypocrisy. What is good for the goose should be good for the gander. Why is the Myanmar Junta demonized, (and perhaps they deserve it) and the Chinese demonized over the vicious destruction of Chinese shops and people over Tibet? Incidentally some of those pictures in the media were not in Tibet but in India, as can be seen from the color of the police uniforms, brown, whereas the Chinese police uniforms are green. Google it.

So the Junta in Tel Aviv gets a free pass, it can close down orphanages in the West Bank because they were trying to make a meager living sewing and making clothes, supported by a charity, and bulldoze houses, arrest politicians and leaders, bomb families on beaches and in the refugee camps, shell indiscriminately families in their beds. Yet no outcries from the ‘international community’ except for Jimmy Carter, and look what happened to him. He may have not have deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between Egypt and Israel, but he sure has earned it in the last few years.

So Gordon Brown is a hypocrite, but he is not alone. The opposition party in Britain is just as complicit and controlled as any government in Western Europe. One does not see the thousands demonstrating against Ukraine joining NATO and the European Union. You do not see the thousands demonstrating against the USA missile defense and radar in Czechoslovakia and Poland. You do not see the trouble that has been caused by allowing and encouraging Kosovo to declare independence from Serbia. What you do see is film stars calling the fighting in Darfur, genocide, without a shred of evidence of widespread killing, no numbers are ever quoted, yet these same ‘concerned’ citizens, never ever mention the genocide going on for sixty years in the Palestinian occupied territories.

In America it is very easy to see the absolute control a few corporations have over the media. The American psyche seems to allow George Bush to admit to lies and nothing is done about it. It is different in Europe, politicians are not quite so blatant as to say as Cheney did, when asked to comment on the people do not agree with him in threatening to bomb Iran. "So?"…. that was his reply. A more blatant disregard for public opinion cannot be imagined. Not one European politician would say such a thing because he or she knows there would be a furious reaction. Nevertheless, the US agenda is followed by NATO and the western European politicians to the letter. The only rift that has appeared lately is the refusal of the EU ministers to push for Ukraine and Belarus to join NATO and the EU, due no doubt to Russia and Putin could hold Europe hostage to energy, as he demonstrated two years ago.

I don’t know where I am going with this and if it ever gets published, there is no doubt will be attacked by vociferous trolls as anti-Semitic or worse. But I humbly and gladly join the likes of President Jimmy Carter in trying to tell the truth, however flawed by lack of real information, which you will, sadly, never see in the lame stream media, never see British politicians telling the truth, never see anything discussed that would upset the status quo in Gaza and the West Bank.

The hidden agenda is just that – hidden. But there are signs that the mortgage meltdown in America and its ramifications around the world – with food riots in many countries, all of them under the vicious capitalist World Bank and the IMF rules and regulations, that has caused their problems in the first place, is beginning to show the cracks in the pleasant picture we are fed about what is going on in the world. More and more people are turning to the internet for information, those of us who have the unfortunate luck to have been shaken awake are beginning to know our enemy.

Don’t get me started about Iraq and the disinformation about the demonization of Iran and Ahmadinejad, Lebanon and Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Fake $100 dollar bills supposedly counterfeited by North Korea, and yet in some respects, they are a better quality than the ‘real’ dollars. How could that possibly be?

*A well travelled and slightly worse for wear 70 year old englishman; widower, several children and grandchildren and a penchant for wondering 'what is the hidden agenda' in almost everything I read. A keen interest in american culture (an oxymoron?) (JOKE!) and politics and an international world view, except where I haven't got first hand experience of the parts of the world I have not visited. Editor of some books about the Qur'an and Islam. Teacher of English in little known countries like Mauritania, Istanbul, Turkey and Morocco.