After Palestinians Buried Their Martyrs, Western Media Buried Israel’s Crimes
JVL Introduction
In this article on the Jacobin website, Julian Sayarer revisits the story of the Tunis cemetery where Jeremy Corbyn supposedly laid a wreath to terrorists.
He didn’t, as made crystal clear when the allegations were made (see here): he was honouring the sixty plus killed when Israel bombed the PLO offices in Tunis in an attack that had been condemned at the time by the UN and by Margaret Thatcher.
What Sayarer wants to do, by revisiting this story, is to right a wrong – not against Jeremy Corbyn, though he does that as well – but against the people of Hammam Chott, forgotten by western governments and the media.
This article was originally published by Jacobin on Fri 1 Oct 2021. Read the original here.
After Palestinians Buried Their Martyrs, Western Media Buried Israel’s Crimes
Hammam Chott is famed in UK media as the Tunis cemetery where Jeremy Corbyn supposedly laid a wreath to terrorists. But “wreathgate” was a lie — and it erased the real crime that happened here on October 1, 1985, when Israeli jets murdered 60 people.
Loading article text…
A brilliant article, very moving.
‘Wreathgate’ served not only to render the nation state innocent even as it kills but to negate the significance of lives lost… A very dangerous combination, with horrifying potential to do harm on a mass scale.
Excellent article. I did not realise Israel still possesses stolen Palestinian bodies which it will not release for burial. Shameful.
An evil, hidden but at the same time exploited by THE evil to hide an even greater evil.
Interesting, moving, and revealing. Thank you JVL for republishing it.
I did a search on Medialens’ website a bit earlier looking for a particular article, and the following article (from December 2019) – which I read at the time it was posted – came up in the results, and so I ended up reading it again. It’s entitled ‘Reopening Auschwitz – The Conspiracy To Stop Corbyn’, and the following is a clip from it:
Israel-based former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook summarised a recent survey published in The Economist:
‘It showed that those identifying as “very left-wing” – the section of the public that supports Corbyn – were among the least likely to express antisemitic attitudes. Those identifying as “very right-wing”, on the other hand – those likely to support Boris “piccaninnies” Johnson – were three and a half times more likely to express hostile attitudes towards Jews.
I think we can safely assume that none of the MSM covered the survey, and for the obvious reason. And here’s another clip:
Our ProQuest database search of newspaper articles for ‘Corbyn’ and ‘anti-semitism’ shows how intensively the issue has been used to attack Corbyn prior to the looming election on December 12:
September = 337 hits
October = 222 hits
November = 1,620 hits
While opinions in effect declaring Corbyn a Nazi are widely reported, opinions defending Corbyn by the likes of John Bercow, Gideon Levy, Norman Finkelstein, Glenn Greenwald, Noam Chomsky, Jonathan Cook, Michael Rosen and others reach a comparatively small audience on social media but are simply ignored by the establishment press reaching millions.
https://www.medialens.org/2019/reopening-auschwitz-the-conspiracy-to-stop-corbyn/
When I first read 1984 in the 60s I understood its description of the methods used by governments to distort the past, either by misinformation, erasion or wholesale falsification to be sci-fi satire. Later I thought it to be based on Stalinism. Since I have become involved with politics (I joined the Labour Party in 2015 to support Jeremy Corbyn’s bid for the leadership) i have come to realize that these tricks are the stratagems of authoritarian groupings everywhere, used whenever they want to conceal their own crimes, or cling on to power, particularly when faced with a challenge from anyone seriously intending to implement policies that involve a radical degree of redistribution.
These groupings are not the exclusive preserve of the Conservatives; they include people from parties like Labour, which affect to be more left-wing, as well as from centrist parties like the Liberal Democrats and (unfortunately) the Greens. Such people are completely ruthless, they will lie, malign, and imprison the people they deem to be their enemies, and tragically they ate assisted in their stratagems by all the main organs of the media, even the once trustworthy Guardian.
This is a profoundly disturbing realization, and I would suspect myself of yielding to paranoia, if the truth of the matter wasn’t constantly being verified by the facts on the ground as well as the few remaining journalists like Jonathan Cook with a reputation for honesty and impartiality.