But the Times is hardly alone in these obfuscating headlines. The Washington Post’s lead story on the massacre is headlined “Gaza buries its dead as death toll from protests at fence with Israel rises to at least 60.” Again, the headline leaves us wondering who killed the people of Gaza? Are we to assume that the protests – and not the Israeli military – killed these people?
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JIM KAVANAGH—No slouch in that regard, Obama was first American President to give bunker-buster bombs to Israel—secretly, precisely because he had publicly said Israel had to curtail settlement construction in exchange for such gifts and didn’t want it to be known that he was capitulating. He was also the first American President to demand that “Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state”—a new, gratuitous, and excessive demand, insisted upon by Netanyahu.
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RICHARD HARDIGAN—Hamas’ charter does state that it refuses to accept Israel’s existence. However,scholarNoam Chomsky argues that Hamas long ago renounced this charter, while Hamas does offer de-facto recognition of Israel, since it was willing to enter a unity government with the Palestinian Authority (PA), an action that implies acceptance of all previous PA-Israel agreements. What Zionists often neglect to mention is that it is Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party that refuses to accept the notion of a Palestinian state, not merely by its actions, but in an official platform, which includes the statement: The Government of Israel flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian/Arab state west of the Jordan River.
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DAVE LINDORFF—This month, the people of Gaza have been engaged in an ongoing and deliberately unarmed protest near the wall that constrains them from leaving their prison. They have continued to do so even as IDF soldiers continue to shoot them with impunity using high-powered rifles, and also firing tear gas and rubber bullets at them. Let’s be clear: What the IDF is engaged in is exactly what Nazi troops were doing in the early days of the notorious Warsaw Ghetto, when Jews from captured Poland were herded into a walled-off part of the city and left to starve in its confines.
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PETER KOENIG—Trump’s decision – although refuted vehemently by the UN – has not only pushed peace light-years away into a phantom distance, but it has brought about a massacre – an unpardonable massacre – with Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth killing with live ammunition. Tens of thousands of unarmed Palestinians were protesting on the Gaza-Israeli border, in the middle of nowhere, at least 100 km away from the US Embassy inaugural celebration in Jerusalem. Israeli soldiers and police killed at least 60, twenty or more of them children and women, and injuring about 3,000 – people who could not be properly treated at hospitals.
