The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #85850 Message #1605338
Posted By: CarolC
15-Nov-05 - 05:25 AM
Thread Name: BS: Muslim Violence
Subject: RE: BS: Muslim Violence
7.
Oren's account of events attendant on the June war frequently descends to vulgar propaganda. Deeming the Israeli combined air and naval assault on the U.S.S. Liberty, in which 34 U.S. Navy men were killed and 171 wounded, an "accident" and an "incident [of] faulty identifications," Oren rehashes official Israeli tales and embellishes on them with his own whoppers. He avers that Israeli reconnaissance pilots flying just overhead on a cloudless morning missed noticing the Liberty's five-by-eight-foot American flag fluttering in the wind because they "were not looking for the Liberty, but rather for Egyptian submarines"; that "the IDF could have easily sunk the Liberty," although with the IDF's extended air attack using missiles, cannon and napalm, followed by a torpedo attack followed by sustained fire on the crippled vessel that left 2/3 of the crew dead or wounded, the miracle is that the Liberty managed, just barely, to stay afloat; and that Israeli ships, after torpedoing the Liberty, "ceased firing the instant the mistake was realized and offered to assist the ship," although surviving members of the crew uniformly testify that the Israeli ships fired from close range after the torpedo explosion and after stopping near the fantail, where the Liberty's name and hull number appeared in large letters (a new oversized American flag had also been unfurled), finally firing on the life rafts in the water, and then left the area for more than an hour before returning to offer assistance (SDW: pp. 264, 271).
Oren claims that the IDF, unable to handle the throngs of Egyptian prisoners, dispatched them toward the Canal and was at pains not to harm them, and "no evidence was found" that Israel executed Egyptian POWs (SDW: pp. 259, 270-1). He is apparently unaware of the national debate that erupted in Israel a few years ago after the publication of unimpeachable eyewitness testimonies of Israeli soldiers as well as the testimony of an Israeli military historian that the IDF executed scores of Egyptian POWs during the June war. Oren also claims that only a "few" of the Palestinians who fled during the June war sought repatriation after it ended (SDW: 306), whereas a conservative Israeli scholarly source reports that fully 120,000 of these Palestinian refugees (half the total number) applied to return but only 21,000 were allowed to do so. Finally, in his survey of developments since the June war, Oren recalls that in the post-Oslo period "Palestinian terrorists killed dozens of Israeli civilians" (SDW: p. 313), but neglects to mention that Israeli forces killed a far greater number of Palestinians and that the "vast majority" of these killings were "unlawful" (Amnesty International).
***
Whenever Israel faces a public relations crisis in the U.S. - i.e., a jot of the reality of its brutal policies manages to break free of ideological controls - a new propaganda initiative is launched to lift the spirits and close the ranks of the Zionist faithful. After Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, the Zionist book of the month was Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial. Soon after the Palestinians entered into revolt in September 2000 and Israel unleashed a new round of violent repression, From Time Immemorial - although definitively shown to be a hoax - was reissued and soared to the top of the Amazon list, soon followed by Oren's book (Amazon frequently featured them together). While certainly a much more sophisticated enterprise, Six Days of War serves the same political agenda as From Time Immemorial. In the introduction Oren states as his goal that the June war "never be seen the same way again." In fact he simply repeats the same old, tired apologetics. Like From Time Immemorial, its real purpose is to reclaim the lost world of Zionist heroism and innocence. With so much water under the bridge, however, except among true believers (admittedly not a small number) it's unlikely to succeed.
Norman G. Finkelstein
November 2002