Moving testimonies by Palestinian former prisoners and "detainees" (imprisoned without charges and often without provocation) of the Israeli military can be seen and heard here: Captured Prisoners
That the Israeli punishment of the people they have conquered is generalized, arbitrary and cruel, and that it has gone on for decades, is not surprising. That is what occupying forces do. It is what U.S. forces are doing in Iraq (not just in Abu Ghraib, but the rapes of teenagers, the destruction of whole cities and all the rest), what the Spanish conquistadores did when they mutilated and massacred inoffensive people in the "New World," the Japanese to the Chinese in Manchukuo and elsewhere, the Germans of the 1940s everywhere in Europe that they conquered. Israelis are only human, which means they can be as savage as the rest of us, no matter what their humanitarian traditions.
What I find harder to explain, and impossible to justify, is the elaborate structure of denial of this cruelty and savagery, maintained by U.S. and British opinion-formers (Rupert Murdoch and friends, other TV and newspapers, preachers, politicians). And especially their insistent claim that Israel is a "democracy." Democracy means "government by the demos, i.e. by the people governed." But in Israel half of the demos it governs is crushed under its army's boots -- including those Arabs to whom it has deigned to grant citizenship and especially all those in the occupied territories to whom it has not.
People in most of the world are not taken in by this; it seems mainly a U.S. and British self-deception (and not all the Brits are convinced, either). So, though it doesn't solve anything, it gives a certain sporting pleasure to see and hear George Galloway go after one of those media people committed to supporting the deception. Check out YouTube - George Galloway Vs. Sky News - SKY NEWS KO'D!!!
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