Obsolete

Monday, December 29, 2008

We are all Gazans now.

To call some of the language used by Israeli leaders and others to defend the mass murder being visited on Gaza sickening is to not even begin to do justice to the immense suffering of the people of that benighted territory. Some are more coy than others, trained over years to be more sensitive towards those who might not understand just how dreadful things are to be an Israeli when suicidal terrorists fire rockets at you every day. When one citizen of Sderot then calls the 320 and rising deaths in Gaza "fantastic", we somewhat accept it, knowing that she herself has suffered from the rain of missiles which often fall on her home town.

Israeli officials themselves cannot be quite as honest, nor quite as cruel. The closest they have come is Ofer Shmerling's remarks to al-Jazeera that he would "play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." The same men and women that wax lyrical and play imaginary violins about how Sderot is under constant siege, how Israel disengaged from Gaza and all it got in return was rocket fire think nothing of openly celebrating the death currently being unleashed from the sky. One drop of Israeli blood may as well be worth one Palestinian life, such is the disparity between the two.

Most enraging and troubling though are the euphemisms, the distortions of language, the unmitigated Unspeak being directly practised by the likes of Tzipi Livni and Ehud Barak. Livni talks of "changing realities" in Gaza; what she means is destroying every single thing that has a connection to Hamas, however slight. In practice, what this "changing of realities" means is the targeting of a single police officer with a Hellfire missile. As most of the police officers in Gaza are members of Hamas, this apparently makes them, at least in Israeli eyes, completely legitimate targets. That most of them have nothing whatsoever to do with Hamas's security apparatus is irrelevant, that some of them were traffic cops and that some of them were only in training also makes no difference. They are therefore not considered to be civilians, so according to the UN "only" around 70 have been killed so far, although they call it a conservative estimate. At least seven civilians were killed in that strike at just one police officer, yet this is not regarded as a terrorist act. When a Palestinian stabbed three settlers in the West Bank, almost certainly as an act of revenge for the on-going operations in Gaza, the Israelis wasted no time in describing him as a terrorist. Both acts are equally indefensible, yet the international community, especially the US, goes out of its way to condemn Hamas while not even so much as chiding Israel for the way it has decided that all-out war against an elected party of government is a perfectly acceptable course of action. Livni's "changing of realities" means that Gazans will loss relatives, friends, brothers, sisters; a very brutal changing of realities. Yet she hides behind her words, condemned by no one outside of political commentators.

Ehud Barak, the "defence" minister, made a highly similar and familiar comment. He said their "intention is to totally change the rules of the game". Tony Blair said almost the same thing after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in this country, leading directly to the government's attempt to introduce 90 days detention without charge for "terrorist suspects". Yet Israel's rules of the game have not changed: just like in 2006 when ambulances, airports, power stations and the Beirut suburbs were all legitimate targets, in Gaza today universities, mosques, police stations and lone officials that may or may not be connected with Hamas can be either obliterated or smeared across the pavement with impunity. The only thing that has changed is that the Kadima government has decided that with six weeks to go before an election that Likud, its right-wing rival is likely to win, now is the time for all-out war against Hamas. For the Gazans, this changing of the rules means that the slow stranglehold they live under has been transformed into one where more than 0.2% of their population can be wiped out without anyone hardly batting an eyelid. 0.2% of the American population would be 61,011; more than 10 times the 3,000 deaths which were enough for a war on terror to be launched that is without apparent end.

When attacks on the person are being carried out so brazenly, attacking the language which justifies it might seem perverse. It is however the twisting of language, the refusal to spell out what such spinning means in the "reality on the ground" that helps stop those responsible from being held to account. War crimes, like in Lebanon in 2006, are being committed by both sides. It just so happens that the war crimes of only one side are, as then, being denounced.

Labels: Gaza, Gaza blockade, Gaza December 2008 raids, Hamas, Israel, Israel-Palestine, language abuse, Unspeak, war crimes

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12/29/2008 10:31:00 PM | Permalink | | links to this post

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

"Heroes" without a cause.

The other side of heroism: Davey Graham injured after being shot in the abdomen during a "Taliban" ambush.

Last month, the Grauniad ran a couple of amusing columns by David Marsh, the editor of the style guide, on the various complaints that come into the readers' editor on the over or wrong usage of words. Top of the list came iconic and ironic, but I'm sure that it'd be easy to add numerous others to that list. As pointed out in the comments, Private Eye until recently had a box every issue titled the "neophiliacs", which listed every usage of the tired "thing" is the new "thing", and has now taken to highlighting the horrible abuse of the word "solutions", invariably by business trying to make their banal and boring services sound just ever so slightly more exciting.

Hero is certainly a description that could be added to that list of abused words. Just what makes someone a hero? Watching Match of the Day, whenever a footballer who's just moved clubs scores his debut goal, the commentator invariably remarks on how he's become the fans' newest hero. We tend to apply it across the board, especially to public servants, whether they be police officers, firemen, nurses (although they're more usually referred to as angels) or soldiers. It also usually gets taken out of its box when someone dies, usually in tragic circumstances, whether they be Garry Newlove, the father who confronted teenagers vandalising the digger he'd hired and who died after being attacked, described by the Sun as a "have-a-go" hero, when all he was doing was what most ordinary people would have done, or Mitchell Henderson, a 13-year-old who killed himself after having his iPod stolen, subsequently referred to as "an hero" on the tributes to him on MySpace, which has fast become an internet meme used to describe anyone who commits suicide.

The line between being a hero and an idiot is one of those thin ones which is difficult to quantify. Today's Sun, trying its best to snatch victory for "Our Boys" from the jaws of general indifference, has perhaps come up with the best description of how close the line goes between the two, relating the story of a single-minded soldier:

Their courage was typified by rifleman Ben Sawyer, aged just 19.

A bullet smashed into his right hand during a rooftop firefight, ripping through tendons and bones.
But the stubborn soldier refused morphine because he was determined to stay standing shoulder to shoulder with his pals. And in the end medics had to strap him to a stretcher to stop him fighting.

The courage of the teenager, who has a young child, did not end there. He was flown home so surgeons could repair his shattered hand. But he kept pestering doctors and nurses to let him go back to Iraq — so eagerly they feared for his sanity and sent him to see a psychiatrist.

He has just returned to Basra after being declared fit for duty.

And he told The Sun: “They thought I was a head case but I just wanted to do my job. If my mates are still stuck in the thick of it, I want to be here helping them."

For those of us more interested in staying alive than in sacrificing life for no discernible rhyme or reason, especially when we've been brought up on a literary diet of Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five and the war poets, all of which express the futility, madness and paranoia associated with armed conflict, it's difficult to assess where Ben Sawyer lies on the craziness/hero paradigm.

It's easy to be cynical, especially when you were opposed to the war from the beginning about the achievements and actions of the British troops, but the individual accounts of astonishing courage related in the Scum's article, withstanding Sawyer's apparent selflessness bordering on insanity are mostly reminiscent of tales passed down into military folklore. The 30 soldiers using cooking oil to lubricate their rifles will remind anyone who's read Antony Beevor's account of the battle of Stalingrad of the trapped or surrounded Soviet troops who often had to resort to using their own urine to do the same to their guns.

Even so, this is still a report bordering on the delusional, descending on occasion into empty adulation of an armed force which didn't always manage to live up to the sentiments expressed in Tim Collins' speech before the beginning of the conflict. For the army (or Tom Newton Dunn, the Scum's defence editor) to pretend that it was their offensives against the Mahdi army that forced it into negotiations is laughable: more that the British forces had to go cap in hand begging that their exit from the city go ahead without more violence aimed against them when at their most vulnerable. Dunn seems to have fallen victim to willful myopia when describing how Basra was quiet yesterday, not willing to make the connection that the exit of British troops just might have had something to do with it. If the figures quoted in the article on the number of roadside bombs are also accurate, it seems also to acquit Iran of major involvement in supplying most of the devices: if the "daisy-chain" armaments supplied are as deadly as the media have hyped up they are, either the militias weren't using them, instead relying on the other improvised devices which often cause little to no damage when targeted against American vehicles, as countless insurgent videos testify, or they're just as hopeless as most of the others are.

To bring this post full circle, it seems that whoever wrote today's Sun leader could do with learning how not to abuse words that they obviously don't understand:

Or the introduction of draconian human rights laws without consultation.

Answers on a postcard as to how "human rights laws" could possibly ever be described as draconian. Perhaps the Sun really ought to stick to treating its readers like idiots with words no longer than a couple of syllables; it seems they find them difficult to get to grips with as well.

Labels: Basra, British troop withdrawal, heroes, language abuse, Scum-watch, Sun-watch