Bethlehem, Palestinian Territories : Family and friends of al-Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, Anton Abu Akleh, attend a candle vigil outside the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank Biblical city of Bethlehem on May 16, 2022. (Photo by HAZEM BADER / AFP)
The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the widely respected Al Jazeera journalist, by Israeli troops last Friday in occupied Palestine, the brutal attack on mourners at her funeral and the Western
world’s blatant unwillingness to use the toughest diplomatic language to condemn these barbaric acts once again expose the iniquitousness of the west-dominated world order.
The 51-year-old Palestinian-American journalist, wearing a safety helmet and vest, which bore the word “PRESS’ in big letters, was shot in the face by an Israeli sniper. She was standing in open view near a roundabout and covering the ongoing raids by Israeli troops in the Palestinian town of Jenin on Wednesday morning.
Since time immemorial, how we honour our dead, no matter how wicked the deceased had been, has been a pointer to the level of civilisation of the culture we belong to. But Israeli troops first stormed her family’s home to remove the Palestinian flag placed on her coffin and then used force to disperse the gathering and stop them from singing freedom songs. They continued the harassment and attacked the pole bearers when defiant Palestinians carried her coffin draped in the Palestinian flag to the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in occupied East Jerusalem.
Despite the attacks by armed Israeli troops and restrictions placed on Palestinians to enter East Jerusalem -- the capital of the state they are being prevented from setting up largely due the Western nations’ mollycoddling of Israel and endorsement of its atrocities -- her funeral attracted a large number of mourners, exceeding the crowd that came for the funeral of the legendary Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah in 2004.
To condemn the attack, the United Nations Security Council adopted a resolution, but as usual, only after the United States, Israel’s protector-in-chief, intervened to remove all references to Israel and the call for an international investigation.
The blood-soaked US foreign policy in support of Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine is in sharp contrast to the so-called moralistic stance it has adopted in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
With Washington’s pseudo moralistic stance and its hyper bias in favour of Israel being exposed, one can confidently wager that the US administration will not blame Israel even if Israel itself confesses to the killing of a US President. That Israel was one of the suspects in the 1963 assassination of US President John F Kennedy is not just another matter. Kennedy had opposed Israel’s nuclear programme and vowed to ban foreign lobbies after the humiliation he suffered at a meeting with the Zionist lobby during his presidential campaign. But often, allegations against Israel were dismissed as conspiracy theories.
Besides, look at the horrible US record of defending Israel even in cases where the victims were American citizens.
Shireen was also an American citizen. Yet, the US condemnation of the killing was lacking in force, prompting human rights activists to question the double standards in the US policy vis-à-vis Palestine and Ukraine.
“There’s deep, deep hypocrisy and irony to US officials calling for an investigation when what they really need to do is look in the mirror,” said Elias Newman, communications director at IfNotNow, a youth-led, anti-occupation Jewish American group.
A dark chapter in the ugly US history of defending Israel was the case of Rachel Corrie, an American youth activist. She was brutally crushed to death by an advancing Israeli Defence Force bulldozer when she stood bravely in front of it to prevent the demolition of Palestinian houses in the occupied Gaza Strip in 2003.
Her family’s call for justice and accountability has not yielded any result, with successive US administrations defending Israel instead of siding
with justice.
Another such case was when some 34 US sailors perished in an attack launched by Israeli Air Force fighter jets and Naval craft on the American warship USS Liberty during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Even after the warship identified itself as an American vessel in communications with the Israeli authorities, the attack took place.
The call for justice by the survivors and the victims’ families remains suppressed, with the US establishment, in its abject submission to Israel, dismissing the attack as a mistake due to miscommunications despite evidence to the contrary. Moreover, the survivors had been imposed gag orders forbidding them to talk about what they endured that day. So much for the US claims to champion freedom of speech.
As long as the American administration perpetrates its double standards, condemning Russia for its invasion of Ukraine while endorsing Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and the annexation of Palestinian cities and towns, including East Jerusalem, the Palestinian suffering will not end.
A case that demonstrated the US double standards was that of Wall Street journalist Daniel Pearl. He was kidnapped and beheaded by terrorists sympathetic to al-Qaeda in 2002 in Pakistan while the US-led coalition had invaded Afghanistan in its war on terror. The US did not relent until the killers were arrested and brought to justice.
Many were the revenge attacks the US had undertaken in response to the killing of US citizens and servicemen. The US retaliation was swift when 13 American servicemen were killed in a suspected ISIS attack outside the Kabul airport in August last year. In 2020, in what was described as a retaliatory attack, the US, showing scant regard for international diplomatic norms, killed Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Commander Qassem Soleimani while he was on an official visit to Baghdad.
No such retaliation is undertaken when Israel is the perpetrator: The US and its Western allies willingly capitulate and whitewash the Israeli crime. Their actions underscore the fascist nature of their
foreign policies.
In cahoots with the US administration in absolving Israel of any criminality are sections of the mainstream US media. Even the widely respected New York Times reported that Shireen died in clashes, disregarding al Jazeera’s insistence she was killed by an Israeli sniper and discounting Palestinian eyewitnesses’ accounts and Israeli human rights activists’ observations.
Sonya E Meyerson-Knox, communications director of the Jewish Voice for Peace, an organisation that opposes Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, told Middle East Eye that instead of reporting the facts confirmed by other journalists, video clips and human rights groups, “the western media have simply parroted talking points from the
Israeli military.”
Coincidentally, Shireen’s death was a precursor to the 74th anniversary of the Nakba – or the catastrophe that happened when Israel declared independence in 1948 after Zionist terror gangs forcefully evicted 750,000 innocent Palestinian people from their villages and executed hundreds of them.
There is little hope that Palestinians can breathe the air of freedom as long as Western imperialist powers throw their weight behind the Israeli oppressor. The Western nations indulge in such duplicity while strutting about the world scene, promoting themselves as champions of democracy, human rights, justice and fair play in a deliberate bid to hide their fascist nakedness.
The truth independent journalists want to report from occupied Palestine remains undistributed or under-conveyed, while big-time western media outlets – most of them owned by Zionists or Zionist sympathisers – twist the facts with impunity in a bid to cover up Israeli crimes.
