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Does Israel Dissiminate Propaganda Against Palestine?

By Colin Dale

Gilad Shalit is an Israeli armoured tank crew corporal seized by Hamas militants in a daring raid behind Israeli lines five years ago in which two others of his tank crew were also killed. It was a military coup in act of war between Israel and the Palestinians. A war which has seen thousands killed and thousands captured and imprisoned with many subject to torture in Israel. Those that Israel has killed in this long-running war, including hundreds of women, children and other civilians in Operation Cast Lead are termed casualties of war - notwithstanding that a majority were non-combatants.

But when an Israeli conscript soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, was captured whilst on military service, he was misleadingly described as 'kidnapped' - a term that that is usually used in a civilian context to describe the abduction of a child.

And the 7000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails and often subject to regular torture to obtain information are not the 'enemy engaged in war' in which one either kills or is killed, but are termed by Israel, 'murderers', in an attempt to convey the impression that when Israel kills, it is the enemy but when Hamas kills it is murder. When the IDF intentionally bombs a civilian family and their children in Gaza, or Lebanon, or uses banned chemical weapons, it is 'collateral damage of war', but when Hamas kills an Israeli family, it is always the 'murder of innocents'.

The Israeli foreign ministry has disseminated this type of propaganda daily through its embassies and diplomatic missions worldwide for many years, but never so effectively as this week's theatrical performance of an innocent boy being 'abducted' and then returned (unharmed) to his family whilst a tearful Binyamin Netanyahu, the supreme commander of the Israeli army takes the credit as Corporal Shalit, (yesterday promoted to Sergeant Major Shalit) is reunited with his family. Meanwhile, thousands of Israel's enemies still rot in Israeli prisons and hundreds of woman and children, in both Lebanon and Gaza, lie dead.