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Last
week, near the official residence of war criminal
Ariel Sharon in West Jerusalem, a member of the Palestinian
police force, Ali Jaara, used his own body as a weapon
of human destruction. The term 'suicide bomber' rapidly
congested the reports of those correspondents seeking
to convey the vast human misery caused by the attack
- ten Israeli citizens dead, their bodily parts scattered
over the street, and fifty injured. Only the day previous
Israel killed eight Palestinians. But the Irish
Times, graphic in its depiction of the effects
of the attack on Israeli civilians, spared us any
detail about the state of the Palestinian bodies.
Nothing about scattered limbs, no comments from the
horrified bystanders that rushed to their aid –
the gore, perhaps, might have helped us deconstruct
the racism that underlies much of the Western perspective
on Palestine and allowed the readership to see Palestinian
dead as flesh and blood ripped asunder - just like,
and on a par with Israeli dead - by other human beings.
But
some in the world of media have no intention of reporting
fairly and accurately. As Professor Greg Philo of
the Glasgow University Media Group, asserts:
The
extent to which some journalism assumes the Israeli
perspective can be seen …(We) … did not
find any reports stating that 'The Palestinian attacks
were in retaliation for the murder of those resisting
the illegal Israeli occupation'.
Having
attended a panel discussion in Belfast last week,
organised by the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign,
and listened to an audience debate with the panellists
the use of the term 'suicide bomber', it struck me
that it is as loaded a use of language as 'suicide
by starvation' was when its application to the Irish
hunger strikes of 1981 was an act of calculated disparagement.
Besides, the media never seem to refer to Israeli
F16 pilots as 'mass murder bombers.'
‘Suicide
bomb’, it was pointed out during the Belfast
discussion, is a term viewed by many in the Islamic
world as being deliberately constructed with a view
to causing offence to Islam, with its strict code
against taking one’s own life. Not that people
should be compelled to desist from offending Islam
or any religion if the need arises. Too often in the
human war of position, the right not to be offended
is cynically employed as a means to outmanoeuvre an
opponent, restrict debate and set the terms of the
agenda. Salman Rushdie’s freedom to criticise
ought to be protected against any religious privilege
aimed at evading scrutiny. Nevertheless, when somebody
from the floor suggested 'human bomb', it rang as
being possessed of a more technically accurate character.
It exudes a certain ambience, which is more value-free
while conveying neither legitimacy nor approval on
the method employed by the carrier of the bomb, which
seems to happen if too much linguistic slippage occurs
and the perpetrator is approvingly referred to as
a 'martyrdom bomber.' The term ‘human bomb',
since its insertion into common Irish usage as a result
of IRA operations in Derry in 1990, is hardly one
that denotes or implies chivalry.
The
argument that such Palestinian bomb attacks are the
result of desperation, otherwise the bombers would
not go to such lengths, seems every bit the ideological
construct that the term 'suicide bomb', itself is.
It aims to replace a myriad of cultural and ideological
factors and strategy-induced tactics with a monocausal
explanation that transfers human agency and externalises
moral responsibility. There is little that would lead
us to conclude that the Kamikaze pilots in the service
of Japanese imperialism during World War 2 were inspired
by desperation. Rather, the ability of Japanese admirals
to create new discourses by tapping into rich veins
in Japanese military and cultural history, proved
a malignantly fertile source of motivation for those
considering hurling themselves into US troop and plane
carriers in the Pacific. Other regions, considerably
more repressive and desperation-inducing than the
appalling situation that prevails in Palestine today,
produced acquiescence, not human bombers. To reduce
wider cultural and societal matters to desperation
depicts Palestinians as mere automatons, not subject
to the same influences as other human beings - one
of which is that human beings alone die and kill in
pursuit of ideas. And one powerful idea is that of
vengeance.
The
deliberate targeting of civilians, Israeli and Palestinian
alike, is a crime against humanity, regardless of
the context that apologists seek to construct. The
human right of all civilians not to be slaughtered
at the altar of another’s cause applies to all
human beings, otherwise we are left to presume that
some people are more human than others, taking us
right back to the malevolent Nazi concept of Untermensch
and its hierarchy of humanity.
Israel,
if it is not forced by its own citizens to take such
things into consideration before it sets out on murderous
missions against Palestinians will again and again
find itself trumped by the immortal words of W. H.
Auden who wrote, ‘those to whom evil is done
do evil in return.’
Before
he set out on his brutal mission Ali Jaara left a
note in which he said he wanted to avenge the eight
Palestinians slaughtered the previous day by Israel.
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