My Take | So is this just how our great free press of the West really operates?
To appreciate the true magnitude of its disgrace, imagine the response if murdered Gazan journalist Hassan Hamad were a Uygur or a Tibetan
Earth, receive an honoured guest … In the nightmare of the dark / All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace / Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie / Locked and frozen in each eye.
– W.H. Auden
“I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to ever view the mainstream Western media with anything but pure disdain,” wrote independent Australian journalist Caitlin Johnstone.
I know the feeling, but unlike Johnstone, I chickened out watching unbearably gruesome pictures or videos of ordinary Palestinians, most of them women and children, being torn to shreds by weapons fired by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) and provided by the United States, but also to a lesser extent by Britain, Germany, Canada and Italy – in short, the Free World, the great protector of global freedom, democracy and human dignity.
It’s quite extraordinary what modern weapons can do to the human body. That’s the main reason there is intense dispute over how many Palestinians have been killed. Often all you have are bits and pieces of human flesh, so it’s difficult to be precise. The weight standard in Gaza is reportedly 75kg of body parts in a garbage bag for one adult, half that for a child.
But what if you were a skinny young lad like Hassan Hamad, the brave and beautiful teenage journalist blown to pieces this week at his home in a drone assassination by the IDF? You’d probably weigh somewhere in between. And of course, countless teenagers like Hamad have been killed, their mortal remains left in pieces.
I have no doubt if this number, though uncertain, of people killed were Israeli or Jewish, there would have been howls of a new Holocaust, with US-led Western militaries preparing for a third world war.
