Israel’s slaughter of aid workers is a tragedy. But it is also a story of western racism
UN staff members inspect the carcass of a car used by World Central Kitchen, that was hit by an Israeli strike in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza on 2 April 2024
Peter Oborne writes in Middle East Eye on 3 April 2024:
In approaching six months of genocidal horror in Gaza, the Israeli army has slaughtered more than 32,000 Palestinians, with thousands more bodies decomposing under the Gaza rubble. More than 70,000 are wounded, many maimed for life.
Among the dead are at least 90 Palestinian journalists and media workers, and nearly 200 aid workers. Some 13,000 children and 9,000 women have been killed by Israel.
And that’s not to speak of the systematic destruction of schools and hospitals, the displacement of 85 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million population, nor the deepening famine. The same attrition rate in the UK would have seen at least one million Britons dead, including approximately 400,000 children.
Until yesterday, politicians of the two main British political parties, Conservative and Labour, along with the mainstream media, have been relaxed about all this. They supported the slaughter and protected the killers.
The British media have demonised or dehumanised Palestinians, while throwing their weight behind Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Too often the media have believed lies and fabrications told to them by the Israeli army, while suppressing or ignoring mounting evidence of Israeli atrocities.
Overnight, this appears to have changed.
A media outcry
Look at the splash headline, for example, in Britain’s leading newspaper of record, The Times. It reads: “Outcry at aid worker deaths”. Spread prominently across the front page were photographs of three victims of Tuesday’s Israeli strike against an aid convoy travelling through Gaza on behalf of the World Central Kitchen charity. Seven aid workers have been killed in total in the attack; three Britons, one Australian, a Pole, an American-Canadian, and only one of whom is reported to be Palestinian.
This is the same Times newspaper which only two months ago consigned the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling that Israel should be investigated for genocide to page 42 (page three of the international section). The same Times newspaper which two days ago completely failed to report the bombshell remark by Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Alicia Kearns that government lawyers knew that Israel had breached international humanitarian law but Foreign Secretary David Cameron had failed to make the knowledge public.
We need not delude ourselves that The Times, and other British papers, would have run the story on its front page had the dead carried Arab names