'Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization.' -- Eugene V. Debs

Sunday, September 26, 2004

It Really Wasn't So Bad... 

Israeli soldiers raid a Palestinian home mortally wounding a wife and mother in the process of blasting down the door. The woman's husband begs the soldiers to send for an ambulance while her children look on in horror. The soldiers then get on with their business of ransacking the house looking for weapons, breaking down walls, and so forth.

Scenes like this are common occurrences in occupied Palestine.

It isn't a common occurrence, however, for the soldiers in question to be accompanied by an Israeli news team and for footage of the event to end up on Israel's channel two.

Here's a link to the footage as presented by the CBC's Neil MacDonald

The video was aired without the consent of the Israeli army, and is quite damning: one of the soldiers states on camera that he "approved of the operation and that it really wasn't so bad." etc. As Diane of Karmalised writes

It's unclear why Channel Two breached the arrangement shared between the three Israeli networks and the army not to air any footage that isn't pre-approved by the military. It would be reasonable to assume it was an act of protest. The alternative, that the media has grown so accustomed to the face of its country's racism they considered the film merely titillating, is too barbaric to contemplate, isn't it?

According to Neil MacDonald, the CBC journalist who compiled this report, when this footage aired people didn't like what they saw. One of the strongest reactions came from an Israeli official who criticised the media for not exercising self censorship.

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