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(by Khalid Amayreh) http://www.mediamonitors.net/khalid44.html Is Israel a democracy or a ‘terror’ocracy? One of the most enduring myths about Israel is the often- made claim that it is a democracy. The big lie is marketed effectively in many Western countries where Zionist- controlled or Zionist-influenced media has a definite stranglehold on public opinion. Consequently, the “veracity” of the myth is taken for granted by many politicians, journalists, intellectuals and ordinary people, and is used as a ready-made weapon against Israel’s critics. The truth of the matter, however, is that Israel is not a real democracy but rather a nefarious ethno-centric terrorocracy that heavily employs State-terror as official policy. This terror, with all its evil manifestations, is sanctioned by the law of the land and defended doggedly by a potent propaganda machine comprising hundreds of news outlets from Sidney to California. For skeptics who might still be induced to give Israeli “democracy” the benefit of the doubt, let us consider the following facts. Israeli leaders from Ben-Gurion to Ariel Sharon committed incalculable crimes against innocent civilians. Some of these crimes assumed genocidal dimensions, such as the Deir Yassin, Tantura, Jenin and Sabra and Shatilla massacres. The First Israeli Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, directed and presided over the utter destruction and obliteration of as many as 500 Palestinian towns and villages. The remains and relics of some of these towns and villages are documented in Walid Khalidi’s masterpiece, All That Remains. That was ethnic cleansing on a very large scale, a crime against humanity by every conceivable standard. Needless to say, the Israeli State committed this genocidal crime willfully for the purpose of effecting Zionism and building a purely racist Jewish State with as few non-Jews as possible. Another Prime Minister, the infamous Menachem Begin, praised the Deir Yassin massacre, calling it a “miracle.” Another Israeli Premier, Yitzhak Shamir, masterminded the killing of hundreds of Palestinian and British civilians. His responsibility for the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem prompted the British government to place him on its most wanted list. ven Yitzhak Rabin, the celebrated “peace maker” and Nobel Prize laureate, had carried out several atrocities against Palestinian civilians in Lud and Ramleh. And while acting as Defense Minister during the first Palestinian uprising against Jewish colonialism, he ordered his soldiers to break Palestinian youngsters’ bones. When Rabin’s ideological son, Ehud Barak, sought to convince Israeli Jews to elect him as Prime Minister, he had to remind them of the most graphic details of how he murdered three Palestinian leaders in Beirut in the late 1970s. The grisly reminder worked effectively, and the decorated terrorist became Prime Minister. Then came the arch-terrorist of them all, Herr Ariel Sharon, Der Fuhrer, a certified war criminal, whom the ignoramus of the White House so unscrupulously called “a man of peace,” is responsible for shedding more innocent blood than any other Israeli leader. Here are some of Sharon’s known infamies: The wicked former general slaughtered scores of innocent peasants at the village of Kfar Kassem in the mid-1950s. In 1956, he slaughtered hundreds of Egyptian prisoners of war by ordering them crushed under the treads of Israeli tanks in the Sinai Peninsula in 1956. And in 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Sharon oversaw the mass slaughter of some 2,000 unsuspecting boys, women and children. Sharon never really regretted the killing, and his atrocities eventually earned him the glorious title of “Malich Yisrael” or “King of Israel.” Far from trying and punishing him for his diabolical crimes, the Israeli citizens actually elected him twice as Prime Minister, with a landslide majority. For the past 30 months, Sharon has been carrying out one of the ugliest reigns of terror in the history of humanity, prompting the former Israeli minister of education, Shulamit Aloni, to remark that “we have become a barbarian people.” Sharon’s crimes against the unprotected and largely unarmed Palestinians transcend reality and defy human imagination. Sharon has presided over the killing and maiming of tens of thousands of civilians, the destruction of thousands of homes, orchards, farms, fields, and civilian infrastructure, forcing many conscientious Jews and non- Jews to draw comparisons between the Nazi holocaust against the Jews and the Israeli war of liquidation against the Palestinians. Oona King, a British Jewish MP and a member of the Jewish Council for Racial Equality, remarked that “Gaza is the same in nature as the Warsaw Ghetto.” She added that “as a Jew, I had hoped I would never live to see the day I was ashamed of the actions of the Jewish State.” She was referring to pregnant Palestinian women shot dead or forced to give birth at Israeli roadblocks, having been barred access to nearby hospitals by Zionism’s heroic soldiers. She was alluding to hundreds of Palestinian towns, villages, hamlets and refugee camps reduced by the Israeli army to huge, open-air concentration camps, only lacking the gas chambers. She was talking about the attempted systematic elimination of a people whose only crime is their enduring desire for freedom from a satanic military occupation unparalleled in the human history. Does a democracy allow soldiers to shoot and kill pregnant women on their way to hospital for no other reason than the fact the poor women adhere to the “wrong” religion and belong to the “wrong” tribe? Does a democracy instruct soldiers to plant landmines in the vicinity of schools in order to kill and maim as many “children of a lesser God” as possible? Does a democracy dispatch warplanes to rain death on apartment buildings and crowded streets and neighbourhoods under the pretext of fighting terror? Does a democracy murder suspects and opponents without charge or trial? Does a democracy practice collective punishment, including hermetic, suffocating and open-ended, against their citizens and subjects? Indeed, does a democracy practice apartheid in its ugliest forms against a sector of its citizens because they happen to belong to the “wrong race?” Is occupying, tormenting, enslaving and dispossessing another people compatible with democracy? Can a racist apartheid State be a true democracy? If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative, then Israel is a democracy. If not, we must not hesitate to call the spade a spade. In short, Israel is a ‘terror’ocracy, not a democracy. -- _____________________________________________________________________ Snel en voordelig ADSL nu voor iedereen bereikbaar. Zon Breedband Budget voor EUR 14,95 per maand. Nu tijdelijk geen aansluitkosten. Bestel snel op zonnet.nl/breedband _______________________________________________ Sent via the discussion list of the Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq. 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