Wednesday, September 7, 2011

Dan Williams, propagandist

In a story on Israeli preparations for Palestinian Arab riots -- er, protests -- anticipated later this month accompanying the Palestinian Authority's bid for statehood at the United Nations, Dan Williams re-writes history and forgets a little something:
Israel is wary of large-scale protests by Palestinians as their leaders sidestep stalled peace talks by appealing for United Nations statehood recognition this month.
A similar deadlock in 2000 triggered a Palestinian revolt that Israel fueled with military crackdowns, resulting in a heavy death toll among unarmed protesters.
As we've noted many times, the Palestinian terror war ("revolt") commencing in 2000 was, according to Palestinian sources, planned months prior to Yasser Arafat's rejection of Ehud Barak's peace offer of a Palestinian state on approximately 94% of the disputed territories.  And while Williams notes the "heavy death toll amongst unarmed [Palestinian] protesters", he appears to have forgotten the heavy death toll amongst Israeli civilians blown-up by armed Palestinian suicide bombers in the same period.

Employing a propaganda technique in which he has become adept, Williams then slips in a fabricated citation:
Brigadier-General Michael Edelstein, the officer crafting Israel's counter-demonstration doctrines, said troops were now better equipped and trained to police the occupied West Bank and the boundaries with Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.
Outside of a few Arabists, Israeli Jews don't refer to the disputed territories of Judea and Samaria as "the occupied West Bank", an Arab-ethnocentric term invented by the government of TransJordan following the ethnic cleansing of Jews in the area in 1948-49.  An Israeli Brigadier-General would almost certainly not use the term, so Williams is fabricating here in an effort to drum into the minds of readers, the notion that the territory rightfully belongs to the Arabs.

Williams then conflates a quote from the same Israeli General with a blatant and reprehensible piece of atrocity propaganda in an effort to demonize Israel:
Asked if this meant that Israeli forces, accused in the past of shoot-on-sight policies against Palestinians, would now show more tolerance, he said: "Much more tolerance."
Accused by whom?  Williams doesn't say.  Note also how the sentence is constructed so as to suggest that the General had acknowledged Williams' atrocity propaganda asserting an Israeli policy of shooting Palestinians on-sight.

Perhaps for his next piece of investigative reporting, Williams can identify the Israeli military directive outlining that policy.

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