Camel Rider …. with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
Attached is a video clip of a statement made by Yair Lapid on 24 October which (thank God) was broadcast on RUSSIA TODAY. You won’t find it in the Western media. It serves as a reminder that people do need to watch RT because that’s where you can find all the juicy news the West ignores.
Yair Lapid stated,
“If the international media is objective, it serves Hamas. If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas. My argument is that the media can’t just claim to bring both sides of the story. If you do that, you are only bringing one, Hamas’ side. That’s cowardly and it’s lazy. It’s an insult, insult to the victims including the Palestinian victims. It is also an insult to the core idea of what journalism is. Believe me, I know, I was a journalist for 31 years. — Yair Lapid, Israeli Prime Minister, July- December 2022.
This is an extremely irrational and fallacious argument, very much in the spirit of the propaganda rhetoric that once came from Joseph Goebbels.
What is wrong with Lapid’s statement? This fanatical extremist presents us here with the worst kind of reasoning, a dreadfully fallacious argument, totally irrational to its core, and the worst propaganda imaginable.
His attempt to attack objectivity is the voice of a madman. It is objectivity that allows us to make sense of events, and to judge them correctly. Today, we can see every day the video footage of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, as well as their extraordinary violations of the UN Charter, International Law, as well as the Geneva Conventions and its Protocols. Over 400 buildings have been destroyed including churches, mosques, UN compounds, schools, universities, hospitals, markets, apartment buildings (each holding around 50 + families), trees, orchards, roads, and not a single Hamas fighter to show for it. What we do see is that over 7,000 Palestinians have been killed, 17,000 wounded, and 2, 500 children killed. How many Israelis have been killed? 1,400.
In analysing Lapid’s words from a sociolinguistic perspective, we find he deliberately uses bad grammar by inserting the word “just” in the sentence “If it just shows both sides, it serves Hamas”. This is grammatically incorrect, but we can see he does it deliberately to emphasise his fallacious reasoning by claiming that if one “only shows both sides, then you serve one side“. That is fallacious and irrational.
In this sentence, it would be more grammatical to leave out the word ‘just’ because in English, the word “just” is used to refer to a singular not a plural. In other words, it would be more correct to say, “If it just shows one side, it serves Israel.” In fact, this is his unstated argument.
And here we see the truth of his words because what Yair Lapid demands of the world’s media is to only show one side, and not be objective, but just show Israel’s side, because it serves Israel. It’s serves Israel interest to destroy the Palestinians people. That is the logical way of making sense of what he is saying and what Israel is doing in committing these atrocious war crimes.
I agree with Martin Jay’s observations. Yair Lapid is mad. The world’s media must totally reject this insane statement because to adopt his argument would be cowardly and lazy. Contrary to his argument, to present one position only, to abandon objectivity would be an insult to the core idea of what journalism is. In other words, the opposite is true of what he claims.
It was equally appalling to see the insane rantings of Israel’s Ambassador to the UN Gilad Erdan ranting and raging, using lies wrapped in strawman arguments to justify Israel’s intention to wipe out the Palestinian race as a proportional response. His demand that the UN Secretary General resign because he said the current conflict did not start in a vacuum is outrageous. Gilad Erdan is insane. He should have been detained by UN Security and taken to a mental hospital for psychiatric treatment. I am not being facetious here. He needs a psychiatrist.
These sorts of irrational mentally deformed insane statements coming from Israeli politicians and diplomats are doing Israel nothing but irreparable damage in the eyes of the international community. You cannot win people over with lies and insane statements like these. No country in the Global South will trust Israel ever again. We rejected the same insanity from Goebbels, and we should reject it when the same insanity comes from Israel.
Contrast this with the voice of reason coming from King Abdullah II of Jordan in his speech at the Cairo Sumit for Peace on 21 October 2023. His speech was also true. Every leader present at the Sumit could see and feel it.
Yair Lapid and Gilad Erdan are propagandists, lying to the world to deceive the world, so Israel can continue the endless slaughter of innocent Palestinians. The West is complacent in these war crimes because the EU, US UK, and Australia are enabling Israel to commit genocide. The truth is these countries now openly support the genocide of Palestinians. It will be a stain on the West for a long time to come.
The UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, has responded to the Israeli Ambassador to UN’s outrageous statements in the UN yesterday. Guterres’ statement sets the record straight. To view it go to,
https://youtu.be/JwQXsuhVgwE?si=iarkifTIzuAGw7Py
Israel is not just indiscriminately butchering Palestinians on mass in cold blood. During his odious diabolical speech at the UN two days ago, Israel’s Ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan told only 2% of the story. In opposing all objectivity and in the spirit of only presenting one side (i.e., Israel’s side), Gilad Erdan failed to mention,
1) Israel has indiscriminately butchered in cold blood 36 UN officials in southern Lebanon and Gaza – some of them were members of the UN Crisis Relief team, including teachers. The 36 UN officials butchered in cold blood by Israel were colleagues of the UN Secretary General. To his credit, the UN Secretary General exercised great restraint by not mentioning that 36 of his colleagues in Lebanon and Gaza had been slaughtered by Israel.
2) Israel has butchered journalists in Lebanon, including Al Jazeera and Reuters journalists. The deaths of these journalists was not accidental as Israel’s claims. It was indiscriminate slaughter.
3) Israel has butchered medical workers in Gaza and Lebanon.
And we could go on like this list with many more indiscriminate killings by Israel.
Threatening the UN Secretary General is deeply troubling. We should remember what happens to UN Secretary Generals the big powers don’t like such as the CIA and Belgium financiers who assassinated UN Secertary-General Dag Hammarskjöld when his plane was attacked flying over the Congo in 1961. His plane didn’t simply crash as Wikipedia claims. And when UN Secretary General Boutros-Ghali supported the Non-Aligned movement and policies the US didn’t like such as speaking out against Western neocolonialism, the US had him removed from the job. Israel is trying to do the same, and all countries must rally around to support the UN Secretary General when he is being bullied and threatened by Israel.
Israel has a long history of assassinating UN officials going back to 1948 when Count Folke Bernadotte (b. 1895; d.1948), a Swedish diplomat, who had been selected as the first United Nations mediator in 1947, was assassinated in Jerusalem together with his aide, the French officer Colonel Andre Serot, by a Zionist terrorist organization.
The leaders of this Zionist terrorist organization went on to become the core political elites of the state of Israel — the same elites that run Israel today. The killer of Count Bernadotte became the bodyguard of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion.
see https://www.un.org/ungifts/bust-count-folke-bernadotte
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20230917-remembering-the-assassination-of-count-bernadotte/
In my humble opinion, the reason why Israel is killing journalists is because Israel doesn’t like journalists doing their job to objectively report both sides of the conflict. Journalists have to be killed so only the Israeli side of the story gets out to the world. This is why Blinken demanded the Qatari Prime Minister influence the Al-Jazeera TV Channel to “soften the rhetoric” about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Blinken told the Qatari Prime Minister to tell Al Jazeera to “reduce the volume of the reports” since they are allegedly full of incitement against Israel.
Israel’s attempts to obliterate objectivity from the planet also explains why UN officials are being indiscriminately killed. UNRWA tweeted today that ‘nearly 600,000 internally displaced people are sheltering in 150 UNRWA facilities. Our shelters are FOUR times over their capacities – many people are sleeping in the streets as current facilities are overwhelmed. At least 40 UNRWA installations have been impacted.”
The UNRWA Commissioner-General said: “There is no safe place in Gaza today.’
Biden says this is all nonsense and that he doesn’t take the causualty figures seriously because no one believes the figures. He seems to think only a tiny number of Palestinians have been killed. He said this today while giving a press conference at the White House with the Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who then praised Biden’s ‘moral clarity’ in dealing with the conflict between the Palestinians and Israel. This clearly shows that Albanese is totally delusional in his reasoning and judgments.
By praising Biden for his ‘moral clarity’– which is nothing but a euphemism for ‘moral bankruptcy’ — the shameful Albanese is enabling Israel to commit genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
It is rather disappointing to find our Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, usually a fair commentator, blindly agreeing with the fragile Joe Biden. Perhaps, politics gets in the way of truth. A recent superb and forthright statement by the earlier USA President, Obama, was really refreshing.