Submitted to M & G. Please distribute widely.
When I have managed to overcome the feelings of nausea and anger, how do I find the words to respond to the article by Simphiwe Dana “Don’t wish the rainbow on Gaza” in the Mail and Guardian, 15 August? It is a script for a horror movie in which every action taken to defend that which is dear and precious is converted by an infinitely cunning and malevolent author into an example of evil beyond all imagining.
So elderly Jewish women and children, who barely 60 years ago were herded into cattle trucks en route to the gas ovens of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Sobibor, Treblinka and others, are now just an excuse to do the same to innocent Palestinians. The images of living and dead skeletons found in heaps in these death camps are, in the new script, to give place to the paraded pictures of Palestinian children killed, according to Dana, for no other reason that they are Palestinian and Jewish Israelis are racists and infinitely malevolent.
In Dana’s entirely fictional horror script, the hundreds of thousands (sorry, millions) of Muslims (and Christians) killed, beheaded, tortured and starved by other Muslims disappears from the screen. The murder of 3 Jewish teenagers by Hamas, the 40 tunnels penetrating deep into Jewish villages from whence masked gunmen were to suddenly emerge to kill and capture Jewish Israelis in a prelude to Armageddon, has no place in Dana’s tale. The thousands of rockets fired into Israel by Hamas with no other motive than to turn their own people into corpses for the front pages of newspapers and television screens and to consolidate their power, is too discomforting to mention. The reality that Israel is a multihued, democratic country must give way to the image of racist Jewish soldiers on a shooting picnic against helpless Palestinians.
Where are the masked Hamas gunmen, dressed in black, brandishing automatic weapons and screaming “death to the Jews”? Where are the young children solemnly reciting that they wish to grow up to kill Jews and become martyrs for the glory of Allah? Where are the mobs in Europe and elsewhere calling for the Holocaust and the gas ovens? Will Dana explain the difference between Hamas and al-Queda, al Shahaab, Boko Haram, ISIS and ISIL and the 40 or so Jihadist terror groups sowing terror across the Middle East, North Africa and further afield – other than for the fact that Hamas’s immediate target are the 6 and a half million Jews living on their border? The historical reality that Israel moved lock, stock and barrel out of Gaza, against enormous opposition in 2005, only to see it turn into a terror haven instead of Monaco, must be airbrushed out of the picture. For how otherwise is Dana to give vent to his hatreds and to garner his measure of notoriety.
In the hierarchy of evils committed in our world, at the apex are those sitting behind keyboards who use words to sow lies, hatred, destruction and misery. I welcome Simphiwe Dana and the editors of the Mail and Guardian into their ranks.
Mike Berger
SOLAR PLEXUS 