Posted by pancho from ? (64.79.4.3) on Sunday, April 21, 2002 at 9:27AM :
You got to hand it to whoever thinks of these things. People in the Media and entertainment industry understand the power of symbols and timing better than anyone...certainly better than we do in our Diapers. Looking through the TV I saw the Robin Williams film "Jacob The Liar" about an adorable Jew...then a story on the Holocaust...all that's left is for Tevye to come dancing across the screen singing about being a rich man..."Yabba Dabba Doo".
Their propagenda machine knows when to kick in, when to kick out, when to kick ass...they know how to pull on which heartstrings till you'd swear the Palestinians ran Auschwitz. They have us looking at the dead in Jenin and thinking..."those poor Jews". Something like watching that old footage of Jewish bodies being scooped up by bulldozers at the Concentration Camps and thinking, "Those poor Nazis".
Would that we understood the power of images and impressions instead of getting a wooden head like Aprim to repeat "facts". What do the facts of the Palestinian situation matter anywhere? Isn't it all perception? What did it matter that the facts are that the Romans killed Jesus...that the facts are that no Jew ever slit a Christian child's throat to collect blood for a passover ritual...that they never poisoned the wells in Europe since as poor people, and they were herded into ghettos, would be the first to suffer? What do any facts in a case matter? This isn't a court of Law...it's Life...where emotions and feelings and images all run rampant and run together blurring every line you can think of.
It was all about the perception the Christian Church gave out of the Jews demanding Jesus be put to death...and based on what evidence?...the writings of Christian fathers who had a vested interest in making the Jews pay for neglecting to recognize that Jesus had to be the Messiah when they were honestly not convinced.
All this bloodshed, all this murder and rape and theft and beatings and thumbscrews and burnings at the stake...all of it based on "feelings" and perceptions and "beliefs" that any god anywhere would wish this kind of misery on anyone, let alone his own dear son.
What could be more clear than the fact that men have created a god to hide behind as they kill and rape and burn? The truth is that Israel, a party within the state, using religion as we use it here, is making a grab for land, has been for some time...and the best excuse they have is the beautifully crafted one that they are grabbing land to defend themselves...that the houses levelled in Jenin and elsewhere will breed enough resentment that "security zones" will have to be extended...and hell you might as well put some Settlers on top of the houses of the "suspected" terrorist children buried underneath cause you got to stop Terrorism and you can't allow that kind of family to live among "decent" folk, if any Palestinian qualifies...and why not place a Jew family from Brooklyn there cause the bible says the land belongs to them anyway.
Oh...if we only understood the power of a simple movie or TV show...or if the Palestinians did. How many noble and moving stories there are buried in that rubble...how many young Anne Franks never had the chance to write a single word for lack of paper and pencil or time but whose dreams were just as poignant because children are the same everywhere.
When will these people learn that they fall into the hands of their enemies never better than when they shoulder a bomb and THINK they are fighting back. When will they learn?
-- pancho
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