Making Israeli Soldiers Kill Palestinians

Joe Quinn
Sott.net

Satirical news site News Thump recently published an article where they 'quoted' Israeli PM Netanyahu on yesterday's massacre of 62 unarmed Palestinians by Israeli soldiers:

Netanyahu has defended his armed forces and their tactics, accusing Palestinians of working together to jump in front of any random sniper's bullets that happened to be in their vicinity.

Netanyahu told reporters,

"These people could have avoided the thousands of high-velocity bullets sent in their general direction if they had wanted to.

"But no, their primary goal was to make Israel look like a bully on the international stage, so they took every opportunity they could to throw themselves in front of bullets that would have otherwise fallen harmlessly into the ground.

"And those dead children were probably thrown in front of bullets by their parents."

The article has been liked 339,000 times on Facebook, and as far as I can tell, few if any realized that the article comes from a satirical site and that Netanyahu did not publicly say those words, or anything like them. But then that's not exactly surprising, because Netanyahu could easily have said those words, and there's little doubt he - and many other members of the Israeli political and military elite - thought them.

On the night of July 20th 2014, the Israeli military shelled the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shuja'iyeh, killing 63 people, 17 children among them. In an attempt to justify that massacre, Netanyahu said at the time:

"We have to protect ourselves. We try to target the rocketeers, we do. And all civilian casualties are not intended by us but actually intended by Hamas who want to pile up as many civilian dead as they can because somebody said they use telegenically dead Palestinians for the cause. They want the more dead the better."

The words are different from News Thump's satirical take, but the message is the same. Palestinian leaders and authorities 'make' Israel kill Palestinian civilians because they want to make Israel look bad ("for the cause"). Many parallels could be drawn with Netanyahu's statement, for example, the rapist who accuses his victim of 'making him do it' or 'asking for it'; the psychologically deranged murderer who claims that he killed prostitutes 'to save them' from a cruel world. When it raises its ugly head in civil society, this kind of twisted psychopathic thinking provokes revulsion and is universally condemned, yet when Netanyahu employs it in relation to the massacring of Gazans, it's accepted as a reasonable argument that absolves him and his shock troops.

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