Western and Israeli hypocrisy in the portrayal of victims

By Paul J. Balles

3 September 2008

Paul J. Balles considers how Western and Israeli media and propagandists conceal the crimes meted out by the US and Israel by anonymizing their victims while using graphic imagery when the victims are their own.

To the ancient Greeks, the Thracians, Egyptians, Persians, Indians, Celts, Germans, Phoenicians, Etruscans, Romans and Carthaginians were all barbarians. In other words, if one wasn't Greek, he was a barbarian.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal (28 August 2008), Judea Pearl referred to Samir Kuntar, recently released from Israeli prisons, as the "arch-symbol of barbarity". Pearl is the father of slain journalist Daniel Pearl.

Daniel Pearl, remember, was captured and beheaded in Karachi, Pakistan, for which British national of Pakistani origin, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was sentenced to death in 2002. More recently (2007), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, at a military hearing in Guantanamo, said that he personally beheaded Pearl.

The modern "barbarians" are not simply members of other tribes as they were in Greek and Roman civilizations or in the raids of the Vikings. Samir Kuntar, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed have all seen themselves in the romantic image of the “noble savage” and they have been hated by the tribes in which they committed their barbaric acts. How do these young men become savages?

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh's life took a turn when he volunteered for charity work in Bosnia in late 1992. The Bosnian war was raging, and he saw atrocities committed by Serbians on Bosnian Muslims. He returned to Britain a committed Muslim radical. In 1993, he emerged in Pakistan as a member of a militant group fighting for the liberation of Kashmir from India.

In 1994, Saeed began training at a camp in Afghanistan. Soon he was teaching the classes. He developed close ties with al-Qaeda while training there. By the end of the year, he became known as Osama bin Laden’s “favoured son” or “my special son”. From then on, Saeed was a fully-fledged terrorist, expressing his hatred in barbaric deeds against the “enemies of Islam”.

What about the "alleged chief planner" of the 9/11 attacks? His crime was so barbaric that he deserved to be paid back with nothing less than the most sophisticated barbarity. The Red Cross reported that he had been kept naked for more than a month and claimed that he had been "kept alternately in suffocating heat and in a painfully cold room."

A New York Times article says the prisoners considered the "most excruciating" of the methods was being shackled to the ceiling and being forced to stand for as long as eight hours. This well-known torture technique has severe physical effects on the victim’s body.

There you have but a brief look into the measures and counter measures of three "noble savages" full of hatred. There's no question that they are all savages, but are they noble? Judging from the celebration in Lebanon at the release of Samir Kuntar, he is a noble savage.

Are these three any more savage than their captors? Do they have any less reason to be barbarians than their torturers? Look at some numbers: 3000 were killed in the World Trade Centre for which al-Qaeda and the Taliban became the objects of American hatred, and for which they paid with more than 15,000 civilian deaths.

Using 9/11 as a false excuse to invade Iraq, America endured casualties of 4150 sacrificed American savages while Iraqis slaughtered since the US invaded Iraq amounts to 1,255,026, as of 30 August 2008. Who are the greater savages?

Judea Pearl dubbed Samir Kuntar “the arch-symbol of barbarity”. Simply reading about how he allegedly slaughtered a four-year-old girl by smashing her head with a rifle butt makes his deed unforgivably sickening to any half-decent human being, just as it was agonizing to read about Daniel Pearl’s beheading.

Wasn’t the genocide of thousands in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps or the deaths of Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank or the liquidation of 1,255,026 Iraqis also agonizing to read about? NO! Unlike the descriptive images used to portray the deaths meted out by the three barbarians, the equally savage and brutal killings of Palestinians and Iraqis and Afghans have not been described in horrid detail. They are merely numbers.

But numbers can be revealing if the reader can transpose the grim image of one victim to many innocents. According to the website If Americans Knew, since September 2000 Palestinians have killed 123 Israeli children and Israelis have killed 1050 Palestinian children. Does that make Israelis almost ten times more barbaric than Palestinians?

Most people aren’t sickened by numbers. Expert propagandists in the US and Israel know how to sicken audiences with the images of others’ brutality. They never provide the same graphic imagery for the horrid crimes they commit. When Al-Jazeera conveys the images equivalent to those used by the West to stimulate hatred of the “barbarians”, they are labelled a biased medium.

Those celebrating the release of Samir Kuntar have seen the gruesome pictures of slain and mangled bodies of their children – the images that never show the savage barbarity of Imperial America and Israel. They are barbarians by any definition; but so are the unnamed, anonymous savages of Israel and the United States who slaughter innocents.