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With a Grain of Salt: Merci for your impartiality

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  • With a Grain of Salt: Merci for your impartiality

    Daily News Egypt, Egypt
    Jan 2 2009



    With a Grain of Salt: Merci for your impartiality

    By Mohamed Salmawy
    First Published: January 2, 2009


    CAIRO: I received a phone call from a French TV correspondent asking
    me to comment on Gaza. A few minutes earlier, I had watched the
    Israeli Embassy spokeswoman in Paris speaking on another TV program.
    The presenter told her that the World Public Opinion calls for a
    ceasefire on both sides. `You cannot put Israel and Hamas in the same
    scale pan' the spokeswoman replied. What applies to one cannot be
    applied to the other; Israel is a democratic state committed to the
    world order and its laws. On the other hand Hamas is an Islamic
    terrorist organization which aims at bringing down the international
    system and demolishing Israel.' This being the last question, the
    interviewer told her `Merci,' ending the interview.

    In my turn, I too say `Merci' to the Israeli spokeswoman. Her reply is
    more succinct than all ado in the Arabic satellite media. I said to
    the French TV correspondent that what the Israeli spokeswoman uttered
    is an arrogant racist view which holds that Israel is comparable and
    equivalent to none. Its nature is totally different. Israel has a
    unique history which no other people share, no matter how much is
    persecuted and expunged. Neither the Armenian, the Kurds nor the Tutsi
    tribes in Rwanda have the right to speak about the genocide they
    suffered. If they absolutely have to, they are to choose another name
    than the `holocaust,' which is a brand name, confined only to the
    Jews.

    This is the logic of the Israeli policy, which views Israel as unlike
    any other country and thus should be allowed what other countries are
    not; namely, occupying the land of others, annexing these lands to its
    territories after confiscating them and expelling their indigenous
    residents. It is also allowed to persecute any Palestinian who refuses
    to leave his land, wages regular genocide campaigns against the
    Palestinians with a view to getting rid of the rest of them or driving
    them to settle in neighboring Arab countries.

    Now for the details of what the Israeli spokeswoman said: that Israel
    is a democratic state. Since when did democracy mean occupation,
    expansion, bloodletting, expelling the indigenous population and
    discriminating against Sephardic Jews?

    If Israel is truly committed to the international system, does this
    commitment allow it to defy the resolutions adopted by the
    international community represented by the UN and its specialized
    agencies and hide behind the support of the US, which backs Israel in
    its violation of the international legitimacy out of greed for the
    Jewish vote? Does Israel's commitment allow it to stock weapons of
    mass destruction, chemical and nuclear alike, at a time when other
    countries are threatened if they try to obtain such weapons?

    Does this commitment allow Israel to refuse adamantly to sign
    international agreements on non-proliferation of nuclear weapons? Does
    Israel's commitment to international laws make it, by means of wars
    and acts of aggression, annex much more land than what was allotted to
    it by the UN resolution based on which it came to exist; a resolution
    which also stipulated the establishment of a Palestinian state on land
    which has now been annexed by Israel?

    Then comes her description of Hamas as a terrorist movement. According
    to the official Israeli statistics, the number of rockets launched by
    Hamas are finite. However, the country of democracy and international
    laws [meaning Israel] has so far killed more than 400 Palestinians,
    including children, women and innocent civilians and injured more than
    1,500 others. So, who is the terrorist? If the terrorism of the former
    is terrorism by a movement, we as Arabs have reservations about its
    behavior, the latter's terrorism is that of a state that has become
    more barbarous and destructive.

    Then, I leveled my criticism to the French TV correspondent saying:
    `It could be understandable that the Israeli embassy's spokeswoman
    utter these falsities. However, it is not understandable that the
    French TV broadcasts them with no comments.' He answered: `We give
    freedom [of speech] to each side to present his viewpoint.'

    I said: `It is your duty towards viewers to present them with the
    truth. But I have not heard once that the Palestinian people are under
    Israeli occupation and that they are seeking to liberate their land
    after more than 40 years of occupation. I imagined that France can
    better understand than anybody else the legitimacy of resistance
    movements. However, by accepting the descriptions given by the Israeli
    spokeswoman, you are de facto accepting what the Nazis, who occupied
    your country, said about the French resistance movement.'

    Mohamed Salmawy is President of the Arab Writers' Union and
    Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ahram Hebdo.
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